Tag Archives: borderline hope

Do we want people to believe that BPD is a real psychiatric illness that they must manage for the rest of their lives, or do we want to promote a message of hope which says, “You can become free of your emotional distress and live the life that you want”?

By presenting BPD as a severe mental illness which can be managed but not cured, the medical model of the BPD label utterly fails to promote hope. Additionally, the medicalized concept of BPD is scientifically broken: It does not describe a valid illness which is consistent across a population.

Why do we keep using BPD if there is so much wrong with it? Is it possible that we would be better off without BPD?

And if BPD is should be abolished, what should replace it?

This article addresses how to replace BPD.

To this question, my first answer is “Nothing” – that we should simply abolish BPD – and my second answer is “Emotional Dysregulation Susceptibility Syndrome”, which I will explore as a hopeful alternative. Let’s discuss these options.

My central conceptual argument is that Borderline Personality Disorder as defined in the DSM is an unreliable, invalid concept. Given its current popularity, it’s not easy to fight against the prevailing notion of BPD as a valid mental illness. But after speaking to many people who also experience BPD as a flawed, discouraging concept, I am more resolute in this view than ever. If you are unfamiliar with the argument against BPD, please see here, especially Myth #5:

While I prefer to understand people without labels, due to practical considerations I contend that BPD should be replaced by a more hopeful label. This new label should refute the myth of BPD as a life-long mental illness and emphasize vulnerability to stress along a continuum.

My position against BPD directly opposes the thinking of many in the psychiatric establishment, including large organizations like TARA BPD, the Treatment and Research Advancements Association for BPD, and NEA BPD, the National Education Alliance for BPD.

TARA and NEA assert that BPD is a “serious psychiatric illness”, one which they can reliably investigate and for which they will create improved treatments. In my opinion, these medicalized viewpoints represent poor research and outright misinformation.

Let me list and critique some of National Education Alliance BPD’s main positions. I hope the reader will sense how badly NEA’s claims on BPD, which often border on outright lies, fail to meet the criteria for good science and basic common sense.

1) BPD is an “illness”.NEA’s position: BPD is a single illness which causes unstable mood and behavior.Edward’s response: BPD is not one unitary entity that causes anything. BPD is not a single illness because the symptom-cluster that supposedly represents BPD cannot be reliably identified by any biomarkers (genes, brain scans, etc.) nor reliably identified by different psychiatrists across a population, as the NIMH recently admitted.
The way a person understands their world based on past experience leads to unstable mood and behavior.

2) Genes are involved in causing BPD.NEA’s Position: Scientists generally agree that genetic and environmental influences are likely to be involved in causing BPD.Edward’s response: This is misleading on so many levels it’s hard to know where to start. Again, BPD is not one reliable entity. And there is no evidence that genes “cause” any of the distress-experiences denoted by the BPD misnomer – such thinking involves the mistaken assumptions that genetic and environmental factors work as separable influences in a quantifiable manner. I have written about these distortions extensively in my article on twin studies (#4).

3) Brain scans provide evidence that biological factors cause BPD.NEA’s position: There is evidence that biology is a factor in causing BPD, due to imaging studies in people with BPD showing abnormalities in brain structure and function.Edward’s response: Does NEA think the public cannot understand basic cause and effect? Of course seriously distressed people have observably different brains than “normals”. That doesn’t mean biology or genes cause these differences; neglect, abuse, and lack of love, which are much more prevalent in those labeled “borderline”, inevitably lead to different brain functioning. But that doesn’t even mean those things cause BPD or that BPD is real. Never take a difference for an illness.

4) Biological factors make people more likely to develop BPD.NEA’s position: The current theory is that some people are more likely to develop BPD due to their biology or genetics and harmful childhood experiences can further increase the risk.Edward’s response: The current theory is a demonstrably false hypothesis. Constitutional vulnerability to stress may make it easier for some people to become overwhelmed by environmental stress, but that doesn’t mean that BPD is in any way a valid illness, nor that such people cannot become well. Plus biology and genetics do not act alone in the way implied in this reductionist model (see – http://www.madinamerica.com/2015/06/are-dsm-psychiatric-disorders-heritable/ )

5) The prevalance of BPD can be quantified.NEA’s position: BPD affects 5.9% of adults at some time in their lifeEdward’s response: Does anyone really believe that a subjective, descriptive label with no biomarkers can have its prevalence reliably identified to a tenth of a percentile?

6) BPD is a life-long mental illness.NEA’s position: People with BPD have BPD for life. (NEA stops short of saying this outright, but they imply it. Their website talks over and over about managing and reducing symptoms in “borderlines” of different ages, never once mentioning the possibility of becoming free of “the illness” or discussing the possibility of full recovery)Edward’s response: This is one of the most damaging myths being promoted about BPD. Problems that are mislabeled BPD can be fully recovered from; people who once approximated borderline criteria can eventually live a satisfying, emotionally normal life. Many thousands of people have already done so. Getting better is hard work, but people do not have to cope with and manage BPD for life. People need real hope, not the discouraging prospect of a life-long illness.

My Manifesto Against National Education Alliance for BPD

As can be seen, NEA BPD set themselves up as the experts on how to define and treat the BPD “illness”, an illness label they obviously intend to keep. But they may not have considered that former “borderlines” can see through their propaganda.

My position on NEA’s “BPD as a serious psychiatric illness” notion is this:

Severely distressed people do not have accept the label BPD as an identity nor as an explanation for their problems.

Emotional problems are not reducible to “psychiatric illnesses”, nor are they the exclusive province of psychiatry.

Effective help which often leads to full recovery from problems mislabeled BPD already exists. Recovering does not require the assistance of “experts on BPD”, nor does it require DBT and medications, although these can help. Also, people can have their own definition of recovery and a meaningful life.

Emotional problems mislabeled BPD can be completely healed and do not have to be managed for life.

It’s time to say goodbye to National Education Alliance’s harmful theories about BPD as a life-long psychiatric illness, to end the borrowed time these theories have been living on.

Why Reducing BPD’s Stigma is Doomed to Failure

I also oppose the message of blogs that attempt to put a positive spin on BPD, like “Make BPD Stigma Free”. In my opinion, reducing BPD’s stigma and building “BPD Pride” is doomed to failure. To me, these efforts resemble shifting deck chairs around on the Titanic. Similar attempts to reduce depression’s and schizophrenia’s stigma have foundered miserably; the problem is that reducing complex emotional issues to medical labels explains nothing and fails to empower people.

Two examples of such programs are instructive:

“Defeat Depression”, a large scale British campaign to reduce the stigma of Major Depressive Disorder, failed to reduce stigma and did not improve outcomes according multiple follow-up studies.

“Beyond Blue”, an Australian attempt to reduce the stigma of so-called mental illnesses, also backfired. Studies investigating its effect found that those who knew less about mental illness diagnoses, or who were given a diagnosis but rejected it, had better outcomes than similar people who believed they “had a mental illness.” This unsettling finding has been confirmed in John Read’s research (e.g. Models of Madness).

The disturbing conclusion of this research is that accepting that you have a “mental illness” – as opposed to rejecting the medical model of emotional distress – actually decreases the chances of recovery. This shocking Youtube presentation by critical psychiatrist Sami Timimi covers this and other eye-opening facts about “mental illness”:

If Defeat Depression and Beyond Blue failed to destigmatize depression, why should a destigmatization program for BPD succeed? Alongside “schizophrenia”, BPD is the most unreliable, invalid, confusing, harmful, stigmatized, and useless label. Even if BPD were to lose its stigma, it would remain an unreliable term that explains nothing about an individual’s problems.

Abolishing BPD – The Ultimate Goal

Borderline Personality Disorder can and should be entirely abolished. BPD should be consigned to history as a tragically misguided way of
concretizing emotional distress.

2) Label-Free Treatment: Psychotherapists and treatment programs would help distressed people without viewing them as borderline, no matter how much the client “fit” that outdated term.

3) Label-Free Family Understanding: Families would be helped to support their distressed members without being fed the fiction that their loved one “has BPD.” Parents, siblings, partners, and children would find that their loved ones’s problems can be understood without calling them borderline.

4) A New Research Paradigm: into severe emotional problems would cease to be focused around BPD. It would instead use the emotional dysregulation spectrum concept that I’m going to discuss. There would be more qualitative, experience-focused research, and less quantitative label-focused research.

5) Abolition of BPD and the DSM: BPD would be abolished from the DSM, as it has already been removed from ICD (Europe’s version of the DSM, from which BPD was recently voted to be dropped). Furthermore, as an unscientific fraud full of fictional illnesses, the entire DSM would be eviscerated.

In time, BPD would be viewed as an outdated relic, a sad symbol of an age where psychiatrists constructed bizarrely misguided labels for emotional distress. People in the year 2200 would look back on “BPD” in disbelief, much as people today look back at centuries-old conceptions of physical illnesses. BPD would be mocked alongside notions of evil spirits released by bloodletting and plagues caused by divine curses.

A BPD-free world is possible. People often underestimate what can be done over long periods of time with sustained, gradual effort. Perhaps BPD’s life is already growing short.

How Would We Understand People Without BPD?

What a scary idea! How could we ever understand people showing “borderline” symptoms without labeling them with BPD?!

How do we understand the problems of anyone we care about?

1) Listen to their story. Learn about what past and present experiences are causing their distress. Develop a shared understanding of their problems based on their history.
2) Learn about what they want to change in the future. Develop a shared understanding of their needs and dreame.
3) Understand fundamental human needs for security, dependence, respect, and independence.

These are the fundamental steps in the Formulation approach to emotional distress, as described here in the story of Emma:

People labeled “borderline” can be effectively helped without labeling them as BPD. But because of the reductionist ideology that has crippled the minds of too many mental health “professionals”, abolishing BPD without a replacement label may be a bridge too far. The Big Pharma profit incentives which maintain the need for medicalization of emotional distress present another obstacle.

The First Step Toward Abolishing BPD – A New Name

Supported by the public’s ignorance about what a precariously perched house of cards “BPD” really is, the profit motives of psychiatrists and Big Pharma will likely block a total abolition of BPD, even though BPD paradoxically never existed and does not exist today. Therefore, I suggest the intermediate step of renaming BPD, something which has already begun to happen for other pseudo-illnesses such as “schizophrenia”.

If done well, renaming BPD would accomplish multiple goals:

1) Undermine the false conceptualization of emotional distress as an illness that is consistent from person to person.
2) Emphasize that emotional distress varies along a continuum and that people labeled “X” are not always “X” (i.e. are not always distressed, but are vulnerable to stress).
3) Reduce stigma by introducing a fresh name without negative connotations.

Despite these hopeful goals, one might argue that replacing BPD with another name would lead to just as much stigma and misunderstanding.

But could a new name truly aspire to be as miserably uninformative as Borderline Personality Disorder?

Would BPD by any other name smell just as bad?

I doubt it.

Japan, Jim Van Os and the Abolition of Schizophrenia

I’ve gone through some brainstorms about what BPD could be renamed, drawing on the campaign against “schizophrenia” for ideas. Many people are calling for schizophrenia to be abolished, and Japan legally abolished schizophrenia about 10 years ago

(Yes, there really are no more “schizophrenics” in Japan. They have a new, less-stigmatizing name for psychotic distress, meaning “integration syndrome” in Japanese, and people undergoing psychotic episodes are no longer called schizophrenic. The entire Japanese government-recording and psychiatric-labeling system for psychosis has been changed. See here – http://www.schres-journal.com/article/S0920-9964(09)00140-6/abstract ).

Van Os renames schizophrenia, “Psychosis Susceptibility Syndrome” , or PSS. The name implies that psychotic experience occurs along a spectrum of severity, involves vulnerability to environmental stress, and that people who have been psychotic in the past are not always psychotic today. In this model, “schizophrenia” as a discrete illness is meaningless and false.

If BPD were renamed Emotional Dysregulation Susceptibility Syndrome, what would that mean? The EDSS concept would contrast with BPD as follows:

1) Spectrum, Not Illness: EDSS represents a spectrum or continuum of increasing vulnerability to emotional distress. Despite similar appearances, people vary along this spectrum both in degree and kind of distress experienced. People would have more or less “EDSS” in relation to others and themselves at different times. EDSS is therefore not one illness, but a spectrum of related conditions – it refutes the misrepresentation of BPD as an internally reliable illness.

2) Vulnerability, Not Illness: EDSS represents a heightened susceptibility or proneness to emotional distress, usually correlated with neglect and abuse in childhood. EDSS itself does not cause distressing symptoms; rather, it represents the heightened likelihood of environmental stress causing these distress experiences. Compared to BPD, EDSS gives more weight to what happens around a person, rather than to isolated non-contextual internal experiences. EDSS is a syndrome – again meaning it represents similar-appearing experiences which do not necessarily reflect a consistent underlying illness.

3) Recovery and Freedom, Not Management: EDSS represents a psychological state that someone can be in at a certain time of their life, but can grow out of and be free from at a later time. It is in no way a lifelong condition. With effective help, people have a good chance of moving out of the EDSS spectrum for good. This refutes one of the most damaging lies about BPD: That BPD is a life-long illness.

(If you could rename BPD, what would you call it and why? Or would you keep BPD? Let me know in the comments.)

A Psychodynamic Model of the EDSS Continuum

Drawing on my psychodynamic background, I conceptualize Emotional Dysregulation Susceptibility Syndrome as a continuum marked by a relative deficit of positive self/object images, combined with a predominance of all-bad images of self/other within a person’s mind. The deficit of good internalized experience and the predominance of all-bad self/other images would usually correlate with neglect, lack of love, abuse, or trauma caused by parents and peers in childhood and young adulthood. I developed this model fully here, drawing on the “master theorist” of borderline-spectrum conditions, Ronald Fairbairn:

The deficit of all-good images leads to the inability to comfort oneself when under stress (i.e. emotional dysregulation), and to the increased susceptibility to stress relative to most emotionally-healthy people who had more consistent past and present support. All the other distress experiences commonly labeled “borderline” – e.g. destructive acting out, lack of identity, rapidly shifting moods, extreme rage, splitting, etc. – would be understandable results of having to cope with the missing self-comforting functions that can only be provided by a predominance of good self/other images over bad self/other images, i.e. enough good experiences in one’s past to reassure oneself when under present-day stress.

These distress experiences would also be understood as present-day replayings of past trauma; i.e. as the projection of the all-bad self-object images internalized in childhood onto others in the present, which make the person experiencing EDSS feel that they are “bad” and others are rejecting or unavailable.

EDSS might also be conceptualized as the spectrum encompassing the “Out of Contact” through “Ambivalent Symbiotic” Phases in this 4-phase model:

These descriptions do not represent an illness, but rather a dynamic state of relating to oneself and others at a certain time. One can function at any point along the spectrum from almost Non-EDSS to very severe EDSS – i.e. from approaching a normal range of being able to comfort oneself and function well, with only occasional regressions into serious distress – down all the way to very severe EDSS, in which the distress experiences are constant and severe to the point that normal functioning is not possible. Hopefully that the paradigmatic differences between BPD and EDSS are clear.

You Don’t Have to Accept the BPD Label

I hope these ideas will be encouraging and provoke thought about whether BPD really is valid and useful. Replacing BPD might seem unthinkable now, but there were times when women voting seemed impossible, when black people being free seemed impossible, and when tobacco causing health problems seemed impossible. Radical change can happen. Often, the process leading to a dramatic change is gradual and unseen, like when decades-long pressure building under the Earth’s crust goes unnoticed before an earthquake.

If a small but growing number of people reject the BPD label, this process can build momentum toward renaming and/or abolishing BPD. I encourage everyone reading this who has ever been labeled “borderline” to consider that you no longer have to identify with or accept BPD, period.

If a psychiatrist labels or has labeled you as BPD, or if the voice of people calling you borderline is stuck in your mind, I encourage you to tell them something like this:

“The BPD label you’ve called me is a simplistic checklist of distress factors, factors which anyone under stress for long enough can experience to different degrees. There are no reliable genes, brain-scans, or other biomarkers which can identify so-called BPD. In fact, BPD is in no way a reliable classification; it is an “illness” fabricated out of thin air without a basis in real science.
There is therefore no proof that I have an illness like you say, or that there is anything innately wrong with my brain; most likely, I am reacting in a perfectly logical way to the stresses I’ve gone through. There are other, better ways to understand my problems, and I do not accept the false label of BPD that you are putting onto me. If I get enough help, I can fully recover and live the life that I want.”

Psychiatrists and therapists need to hear this from more of the people they call “borderline”!

Where did BPD come from, and how was it passed down to modern humans? This is one of the more vexing questions of our age. For an answer, we must turn to the all-knowing wisdom of American psychiatry, which proclaims:

“BPD is strongly inherited.” This seems like an answer to where BPD comes from. But is it? According to psychiatry, BPD is mostly in the genes. But how could this dreaded disease have originally developed? It didn’t magically appear out of thin air. This begs the question: From whom was BPD first inherited? Who – or what – was the real “first borderline”?

In this essay, I will take psychiatry’s thinking to its logical conclusion. If BPD is “inherited”, we should be able to track down the ultimate source of this nefarious malady. Prepare to embark on a fascinating journey of discovery. My theories are based on exciting new research by paleo-psychiatrists – scientists who study mental illness in prehistoric creatures.

Early Speculations on BPD’s Origin

Early paleo-psychiatrists raised questions like the following in their search for the first borderline:

Was the first borderline an Egyptian slave who began to have mood swings under the stress of building the pyramids, 4,000 years ago?

Was the first borderline a Bronze Age Mesopotamian mother who, traumatized by hard farm work, began to view her fellow Sumerians as saints or devils, 8,000 years back?

Or was the first borderline an Aboriginal hunter-gatherer who, after too many attacks by dingo dogs, developed identity diffusion in the Australian outback 12,000 years ago?

Did one of these ancient people first become borderline, and then transmit the invisible plague to their prehistoric children and on to us?

(Aside: Recent genetic studies by paleo-geneti-psychiatrists have suggested that, in addition to the normal gene-coding letters A, C, G, T, the nucleobases B, P, and D are present in the genomes of people with BPD. So genes in a healthy person, which originally read GATCGGCAGGAACAT, would come to read GATBPDCAGBPDGAABPD. This is why I’ve been terrified to get my genes mapped, for fear those cursed combinations will appear in my DNA strands, to be inevitably passed on to my children.)

BPD and Early Man

Returning to the main story, the answer is no. BPD extends back far past early Egyptians, Mesopotamians, and Aborigines. Paleo-psychiatrists recently found that cavemen exhibited Borderline Personality Disorder. Witness the following image, found on prehistoric cave walls at Laschaux, France, but concealed from the public until now:

With this life-like painting revealed, it is scientifically proven that BPD extends at least to our caveman ancestors. This is so easy to figure out, even a caveman can do it.

So perhaps BPD originated with these forward-thinking cavemen, who would have been traumatized by living in rotten, damp caves. But couldn’t cavemen have inherited BPD from earlier humanoids?

Through the theory of evolution, we know that humans evolved from early apes (or at least, people who think the earth is more than 6,000 years old know this). So maybe the situation looks more like this:

These monkeys are not going to tell us anything definitive, but that bonobo looks suspicious.

Prehistoric Megafauna and BPD

Early apes are an interesting potential source of BPD. But other evidence suggests that the vile pathology worms its way back further. Each of these early humans and apes evolved from other life-forms, any of which could have been the first carrier of the abominable affliction. The plot thickens, and if we want to know where BPD truly came from, we must gaze deeper into the past.

Paleo-psychiatrists recently found this fossilized face-off between the last saber-toothed tiger and the first prehistoric mountain lion. From their facial expressions, it was deduced that they were snarling the following at each other:

But of course, if prehistoric big cats had borderline symptoms, it begs the question of where they inherited them from. Peering further over the horizon, here is cave art drawn by a Paraceratherium, revealing fantasies it was having about the cause of its family’s BPD symptoms:

So in this image, we have evidence that BPD existed at least 15 millions years ago, in the age of the megafauna or giant mammals. But there’s more.

Psychiatry’s Return to the Days of the Dinosaurs

Excited by their study of the megafauna, paleo-psychiatrists dug ever deeper into forgotten times. The two creatures below were recently unearthed from a prehistoric swamp after being buried by a 65-million-year old mudslide. Paleo-psychiatrists determined that they were saying the following:

Well, this picture is not exactly about BPD. But given the high comorbidity between Avoidant PD, Narcissistic PD, and Borderline PD, it can be said with confidence that BPD dates back at least 65 million years. If avoidant and narcissistic dinosaurs roamed early Earth, then giant reptilian borderlines would have been lumbering around too.

Indeed, all sorts of personality-disordered dinosaurs must have existed in the Cretaceous, Jurassic, and Triassic eras. This makes it much more difficult to trace who the first borderline was. But it does enable us to watch The Land Before Time and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs with a new understanding of these monsters.

The search begins to seem endless. Who was the real first borderline? This situation brings to mind the Where’s Waldo? books, when you can never find the little guy in red and white stripes. Or perhaps it should be Where’s the Borderline?:

Sorry. Back to the topic at hand.

Early Avian and Mammalian Ancestors

As I was saying, paleo-psychiatry keeps making new discoveries. To trace the passage of the fearsome plague that is BPD into humans, we should also investigate the earliest birds and mammals, who shared common ancestors and lived alongside dinosaurs. Early mammals lived in a traumatic environment, which we know is a risk factor for BPD. Perhaps the trauma of living with big, scary dinosaurs was transmitted into their genes, creating a vulnerability that led to BPD in humans.

One can imagine the following scenario:

As well as this one:

It makes sense that borderline traits might develop and be genetically transmitted in such an environment. But couldn’t BPD have developed in pre-dinosaur times, and been transmitted from an even earlier starting point?

A Never-Ending Goose Chase

We must commend paleo-psychiatrists for their efforts to trace the early animal origins of BPD, efforts which are as scientific and respectable as those of modern-day psychiatrists to study BPD in humans.

But despite heroic efforts, paleo-psychiatrists have not traced BPD’s ultimate origin, which remains shrouded in mystery. It seems straightforward to follow the evolution of BPD from modern day humans, past cavemen, through early mammals and dinosaurs, all the way to the earliest forms of life. But this process never reaches a satisfying conclusion. With evolution working as it does, there would always be another creature from which to inherit BPD.

We can even imagine unicellular cells, flitting around the primordial fires of early Earth, transmitting their borderline traits to the first multicellular organisms:

But let’s not go there.

Creationism – A Solution to the Conundrum?

There is another possibility. What if evolution is wrong, and another theory explains BPD’s origin and heritability? What if Earth is only 6,000 years old, as creationists solemnly preach, and as some of our finest public schools teach as an alternative to evolution?

Creationism would elegantly explain how BPD developed. Under creationist teaching, BPD would be a result of the trauma that early humans experienced living alongside dinosaurs and other “prehistoric” creatures. If God created the Earth 6,000 years ago, he would have put all the creatures in history together, even if it resulted in strange alterations to traditional Biblical stories, like this:

And this:

And this:

No wonder the authors of the Bible wanted to cover up this sordid state of affairs. Living alongside dinosaurs would have made things scary and unpredictable for early humans. And as we know, such traumatic environments are a prime cause of BPD. Therefore, 6,000 year-old dinosaurs may have been the primary reason that BPD developed and was genetically passed down from early to modern humans.

Thus, the trauma of living alongside these monstrosities would have affected mankind’s genes such that BPD would quickly develop as a distinct disease. As Jonathan Swift might have said, this is “a modest proposal”, but a convincing one.

Just imagine the following scene, which would have been a daily occurrence 6,000 years ago:

And this:

Who would not develop borderline symptoms in such conditions?

And imagine having to live alongside abominations never preserved in the fossil record (the fossil record having been planted to trick creationists into believing in evolution, of course), like this:

How horrifying! Thank goodness the dinosaurs and swamp-monster abominations were finally wiped out in an almighty Ragnarok-like battle against invading aliens:

If dinosaurs and aliens had not annihilated each other a few thousand years ago, then modern civilization would never have developed. If dinosaurs did not die out, we poor humans would have been stuck with dinosaur-induced BPD symptoms, but without the gentle ministrations of modern psychiatry to help us manage them. So let us give thanks that aliens and dinosaurs wiped each other out, because DBT wouldn’t be possible with Tyrannosaurs constantly chasing us.

For me then, creationism provides the best explanation of BPD’s origin. It seems that we must renounce evolution, and accept the fact that the Earth is only 6,000 years old, since no other theory explains BPD’s origins so simply and elegantly. Remember Occam’s Razor – the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.

Alternate Explanations: Pastafarianism

However, there are other explanations. I was recently contacted by a Pastafarian paleo-psychiatrist, who suggested that the Flying Spaghetti Monster might be the cause of BPD. (For those of you who don’t know, Pastafarianism is the religion which teaches that a Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe. Visit the Church of his Noodly Appendage at http://www.venganza.org )

So, instead of this scenario leading to BPD:

The following scenario would have accounted for the illness:

However, try as I might, I cannot think of a real reason why the Spaghetti Monster would want to create BPD. His job is to create the universe and feed people pasta, not generate mental illnesses. So this doesn’t fly with me, even if the Spaghetti Monster “flies” in another way.

The Scientific Integrity of My Research

For those of you who think this is a joke, it is not. Do not hurt my feelings by commenting that these theories are unscientific. I am earnestly supporting the efforts of our nation’s finest psychiatrists in tracing the source of BPD, a pathology which even they admit “the causes and origins of are unclear”. What could be more noble than shedding light on the origins of such a misunderstood affliction?

The Learning Doesn’t Stop Here

Despite their confusion around the inheritance issue, there is much more to be learned from psychiatry’s penetrating insights into BPD.

Psychiatry wisely teaches us that BPD is a “severe illness”, that BPD has a “course” and an “outcome”, that a certain percentage of the population “has it”, how psychotherapy and medications can “manage it”, and so on.

We must give thanks to psychiatry for creating such a wonderful and sympathetic way of understanding human emotional problems. Hearing the pontifications of psychiatrists on BPD is like listening to beautiful classical music.

If you want to learn more about these encouraging, scientifically-sound ideas via our government’s finest websites, as well as from many forums about BPD, make sure you are prepared. Before you research BPD’s cause and origins on Google, you will need:

A good sturdy chair.

A thick pillow to keep your ass from getting sore.

Eyedrops

Pain relief ointment for your mouse-clicking finger.

Tissues

Headache medications.

And take heart: Everything you learn about BPD from traditional psychiatry will be just as scientifically valid as my research above. Good luck!

The Scientific Process by which BPD Sprang Into Being

Now, if BPD first developed in early humans living alongside dinosaurs – who wouldn’t have referred to their symptoms as “Borderline Personality Disorder” – it is interesting to consider when the term BPD first emerged in modern psychiatric usage. Below is an imagining of the scientific process by which BPD may have developed.

A Conversation Between Two Medical Doctors of the Mind (i.e. Psychiatrists)

(Setting – Drs. Chillingworth and Hadley are smoking it up outside a beautiful hotel, discussing the current state of the psychiatric art..)

Dr. Chillingworth: “I’m so thrilled to be back at our nation’s premier psychiatry conference. Our catalogue of mental afflictions is crying out for new names. You know, my dear Hadley, I don’t think we’re upsetting people enough by calling them neurotics and hysterics. The masses need to know when there’s something wrong with them, and those labels just don’t do it for me anymore. We need something to really get the blood boiling.”

Dr. Hadley: “I agree, dear Chillingworth. I call the crazy ones schizophrenic, but they don’t even react! It’s most disturbing. I wonder where we’ve gone wrong.”

H: “How about “Weirdo Syndrome”? You know, for the bizarre folks who aren’t totally crazy, but we don’t know what else to call them?”

C: “Oh humbug! Is that the best idea you have?!”

H: “Forget that. What about “Queer Disorder”. It could be a brand new affliction. We know there’s something wrong with the homos; everyone suspects there’s a malignant germ plasm in their blood!

C: “No dice! Our friend Dr. Beavis beat you to the punch – he’s presenting this idea tomorrow. Don’t worry, homosexuality will be an official disorder. Come on, we need something original!”(Historical note: Homosexuality was an official DSM disorder until the mid 1970’s).

H: “How about….. “borderline”? We can use it on the ones who aren’t neurotics, but aren’t raving psychotics? You know, the people who are always pissing me off.”

C: “Yes!! Yes. That’s it. … “Borderline!” Wow…. It’s a bunch of bullshit – it doesn’t mean anything. But that’s why it’s brilliant. People won’t know what it means, so it will work perfectly. Let’s use it!”

H: “But how can we be sure that people will buy it, Chillingworth?”

C: “That’s easy. We list things about people who aren’t raving psychos, but are “messed up”. We say if you fit enough of the criteria, you’re a borderline! We make it all sound very scientific and official. The criteria could be things like being irritable, having mood swings, having relationship problems, being impulsive, etc. etc. Things anyone can have, taken to an extreme. Anything we can make up about people we don’t like.

H: “But do you really think people will believe that? I don’t know…”

C: “Of course they will! Give yourself some credit, Hadley; stop overestimating your fellow human beings. Most members of our species are uneducated idiots. If psychiatrists repeat a made-up label loudly and often enough, people will believe it. Remember, the public think we’re experts.”

H: “This is great! But you know, I just realized something, Chillingworth. You’re pretty messed up yourself.”

C: “Tell me something I don’t know!”

H: “Indeed. Moving on… do you think that, many decades years from now, people might think this “borderline” label we dreamed up is real, and a whole industry will be based around labeling and managing these “borderlines”? I don’t know if I would feel good about that.

C: “Oh stop whining! The Borderline affliction will become real, because we say it is. We became psychiatrists so we can be exalted as experts and given bundles of money. Who cares if we have no idea why people act like they do? And who gives a damn about people in the future? Our genius is that we have no idea what we’re talking about, but people pay us anyway. Have faith, my friend.”

And thus was born “Borderline Personality Disorder.”

(Historical note: BPD was in fact “born” after psychiatrists in the late 1930s invented the term out of thin air. Perhaps not exactly like this. But close enough…)

If you are struggling with BPD yourself or would like to more effectively help someone who is borderline, I would be happy to listen to your story and provide feedback if possible. Feel free to provide constructive criticism of this site also.

This article is the opinion of a non-professional layperson, and should not be taken as medical advice or as the view of a therapist who is professionally qualified to treat Borderline Personality Disorder or any other mental health condition. Readers should consult with a qualified mental health professional before undertaking any treatment

I recently rewrote my story of struggling with and overcoming the borderline diagnosis. The account below describes the beatings I endured as a child, periods of extreme hopelessness, encounters with stigmatizing psychiatrists, an argument that conceptualizing BPD as a life-long disorder can be harmful, analysis of how I deconstructed the borderline label, a very brief account of my therapy, and some of my proudest achievements in work and love.

Although it’s brief for a life story, I hope you find this account encouraging. I’m not better or fundamentally different than anyone else who gets labeled BPD, and given sufficient support anyone with “borderline” symptoms can do very well.

How I Triumphed Over Borderline Personality Disorder

Welcome to my story of recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). This story will illustrate how I went from fearing this dreaded diagnosis, to being hopeful about it, to finally no longer believing in its validity.

Here are two early encounters with “mental illness” that show how I grew to fear psychiatric labels:

Vignette #1 – When I was eighteen, my mother and I sought professional help after years of emotional abuse at the hands of my father.

In our first session, the therapist said, “It sounds to me like your father has a personality disorder…You know, there are normal people, there are those who are a little bit outside our societal norms, and then there are people who are really beyond the pale. In this last group are the ones we call ‘personality disordered’. These people are very difficult to help, and many therapists consider them ‘untreatable’.”

Being unfamiliar with “personality disorders”, my mom and I didn’t know what to make of this. But despite my father’s abuse, I disliked this therapist’s cavalier labeling of someone he had never met.

Vignette #2 – At age twenty, I became suicidal and had to be involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital. The following example comes from a group therapy session inside the hospital:

“Mood disorders are biologically-basedmental illnesses,” the psychiatrist announced authoritatively, surveying the fifteen young adults in front of him. “But while these disorders might be biological, it doesn’t mean you can’t manage them effectively.”

My mind reacted explosively: How the hell could you possibly know this? What evidence do you have? I desperately wanted to shout at him. But I remained silent, slouching backward in my chair.

These snapshots encapsulate the hopeless viewpoint with which psychiatry assaulted me. It would take everything I had to break free from the resulting fear and despair.

How I Became “Borderline” – A Very Brief History

As of this writing, I’m twenty-nine years old. I grew up in a family of four on the east coast of the United States. My father worked a demanding financial-sector job, and my mother taught school part-time while caring for my younger sister and me. Our childhood was marked by isolation, emotional deprivation, and physical abuse. Starting when I was six, my father regularly beat me for small infractions such as arguing with my sister, outside of which he remained emotionally distant. He often sat on our living room couch staring into space for hours at a time.

Two memories of the abuse stand out. On one occasion, when I was around ten, my father, who was about 6’3 and 225 pounds, chased me to my room, broke my locked bedroom door off its hinges, and attacked me with fists to my face. On another, he picked me up and threw me ten feet across a room onto the sharp edge of a table. He would usually follow these incidents by telling me that he loved me, but would then return to his catatonic-like state on the couch. My mother tried to protect me, but was too afraid and insecure to be of much help. Child services were never contacted.

By my late teens, I felt depressed, scared, and helpless. Despite doing well in school – I was a good student who enjoyed playing tennis and violin with school groups – I had no close friends, and didn’t know how to talk to girls. The growing pressure to leave home and function as an adult felt incredibly threatening. At the same time, my father’s mental health was deteriorating further – he had to be hospitalized multiple times for manic episodes and suicidal depression.

As our family life broke down, things felt increasingly hopeless. I felt furious at my parents, and suffered intense mood swings of rage, emptiness, depression, and terror. I wanted to get help, but couldn’t trust anyone enough to open up about what I was feeling.

Eventually I became suicidal, and after concocting a plan to kill myself, which almost succeeded, I was involuntarily hospitalized. This episode led to the diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder, given to me by a psychiatrist at the hospital. I spent two weeks at the hospital in a shocked, barely coherent state, getting little help from superficial group therapy and heavy medications. The only good thing was that I stopped being actively suicidal.

The First Phase – BPD: A Life Sentence?

In the year after my hospitalization, I extensively researched my “illness”. Most readers will be familiar with the core “borderline” traits: they include black and white thinking (“splitting”), self-damaging behaviors, impulsivity, fear of abandonment, and unstable interpersonal relationships.

Through interactions with psychiatrists, internet forums, and pop psychology books, I found out the following “facts” about Borderline Personality Disorder:

BPD is a life-long mental illness; it can be managed but not cured.

Due to their reputation for being manipulative and demanding, most “borderlines” are avoided by therapists.

Twin studies show that 50% or more of vulnerability for BPD is transmitted through genes.

Brain imaging reveals that the brains of borderlines differ significantly from the brains of “normals.”

Borderlines suffer from a constitutional deficit that prevents them from regulating their emotions normally.

As a young person, I didn’t know how to evaluate these data. If a person had “Ph.D” or “M.D.” by their name, I tended to believe what they said. When I was already vulnerable, these ideas heightened the terror. I became possessed by the fear of being a “hopeless borderline”, of having a life-long mental illness that was impossible to cure. I was not only facing formidable challenges in reality – like my father’s abuse and a lack of social skills – but was further impeded by the intense anxiety and hopelessness surrounding the label “BPD”.

Questioning The Pessimism

By the time I was twenty-one, my parents had divorced and I’d chosen to live with my mother. For two years after my hospitalization, I was unable to work or attend college. Much of my time was spent at home, severely depressed, isolated, and brooding about being a “hopeless borderline.”

At this time, I was seeing a psychiatrist once a week for fifty minutes a session. Over a two-year period, he prescribed me twelve different antidepressant and antianxiety medications. We kept trying different pills, with nothing helping much. If I had known then what I know now – that many psychiatric medications are little more effective than placebos – I would never have taken so many.

To his credit, this psychiatrist tried to “do therapy” with me. Unfortunately, I was in such a traumatized state that I could not take in his empathy nor understand my family history. However, I gradually became aware that someone wanted to help. I noticed that although my psychiatrist knew I had been labeled borderline at the hospital, he never used this label on me.

This experience with the kind psychiatrist built up a sliver of hope. I realized that I felt a little better after talking to him, and wondered if that feeling could become stronger. Sometimes I would have the thought, “Maybe there is really nothing wrong with me.” Part of me wanted to fight, to become alive, to feel like a real person. When I had the daily thoughts about borderlines being doomed, a voice inside my mind started saying, “They are lying to you!” I wanted to find out what this meant.

Over time, I felt increasingly angry about the way borderlines were stigmatized. How could borderlines be so bad? Had none of them ever been “cured”? What if the things I’d read about borderlines were untrue, or the result of therapists who didn’t know how to treat them?

The Second Phase – “Borderlines Can Do Well”

With these doubts surfacing, I began to research BPD in greater depth. Up to that point, I had received most of my information from the hospital staff and internet forums where people spoke negatively about “their borderlines.”

I decided to go on Amazon and look for new information. The books that influenced me the most were older psychoanalytic texts. Their authors included Gerald Adler (Borderline Psychopathology and Its Treatment), Jeffrey Seinfeld (The Bad Object), James Masterson (e.g. The Search for the Real Self), and Harold Searles (My Work With Borderline Patients).

As I read about borderlines in long-term therapy, I was shocked to realize that many borderlines had fully recovered. The case studies showed people starting out hopeless and nonfunctional, but becoming able to work productively and enjoy relationships. It was crystal clear from the narratives that these “borderlines” were coming to trust others, working through their pain, and coming alive. I finally had some hope. Given enough time and support, former borderlines could improve greatly and even be “cured”.

I remember thinking, “Wow, a lot of what I’ve been told about BPD is completely wrong; this is not a hopeless condition! If other borderlines can recover, why can’t I do it?”

This burst of hope inspired me to seek help. I pursued psychodynamic therapy, interviewing several therapists and finding a kind psychologist who had worked with many trauma survivors. I went to see her twice a week for several years.

Gradually, painstakingly, I made progress. Through reading accounts of borderlines recovering and discussing the fears around diagnosis with my therapist, my anxiety and hopelessness lessened. I formed a really good bond with this therapist, coming to trust someone deeply for the first time. Being “reparented” and taking in her love was the most important step in my becoming well for the first time (I would call it “recovery”, but I had never been well before).

For the first time ever I had periods of feeling calm. I felt like Michael Valentine Smith, the Martian man from Stranger in a Strange Land who learns what it is to be human. Becoming able to trust other people, feeling safe in my own skin, appreciating the sun and the flowers and the trees, feeling that I was going to survive, it was all strange, incredible, and bittersweet.

Using online groups like Meetup, I tentatively started to seek out people my age. Feeling more capable, I earned a professional qualification and began teaching sports to young children. The more time I spent around energetic kids, the harder it was to remain pessimistic. Being still a child at heart, I found a talent for relating to children on their level.

The Third Phase: “My Way of Thinking about BPD Doesn’t Make Sense”

In difficult times, I continued to worry about the pessimists who said full recovery from BPD was impossible. I was still thinking of things in terms of “borderlines act like this, borderlines don’t act like that, borderlines can do well, borderlines can’t do well, etc.” The label still felt real.

But with life experience, I began to doubt BPD. I wondered if BPD – the disorder, not the symptoms – really existed at all. The following questions became increasingly problematic:

How can therapists reliably determine the degree of a given symptom that warrants its inclusion in a BPD diagnosis? For example, who can say when someone’s relationships are unstable enough, or when a person feels empty enough, to cross the threshold and suddenly become a “borderline” symptom? The subjective, descriptive nature of BPD symptoms seemed like a major weakness.

Person A could have only symptoms 1 through 5 from the DSM IV, and Person B could have only symptoms 5 through 9. The people might even be very different in how they express the one common symptom. Do persons A and B really have the same “disorder”?

Did researchers have strong evidence that BPD was genetically transmitted, or that brain differences between borderlines and “normal” were caused by biology?

Why does BPD have 9 symptoms? Why not 4, or 23, or 87? How was BPD’s existence as a 9-symptom “illness” first inferred?
(I realize that BPD has magically “changed” in the new DSM V. But in slightly varied forms, all of these criticisms would apply just as much to the “new BPD”; these examples represent the time when the DSM-IV was current).

As far as I was concerned, there were no satisfying answers to these questions.

The Fourth Phase: “I Don’t Need BPD Anymore”

Something felt fishy about the whole psychiatric labeling system. I suspected that BPD, along with the other labels, represented a house of cards that would collapse under close examination. More research was in order.

This time, I discovered a group of writers including Stuark Kirk (e.g. Making Us Crazy), Paula Caplan (They Say You’re Crazy), Jay Joseph (The Gene Illusion), John Read (Models of Madness), Barry Duncan (The Heroic Client), Mary Boyle (Schizophrenia: A Scientific Delusion?), and Richard Bentall (Madness Explained). From their writing and through observing myself, I came to the following conclusions:

While all the borderline symptoms are real in different degrees and varieties, BPD itself is not a reliable or valid syndrome. In other words, there is no evidence that the symptoms labeled “BPD” occur together in people more frequently than would be expected based on chance alone;

No one can reliably draw a line for any of the borderline symptoms beyond which one is “borderline” and before which one is “normal.” In other words, the subjective, descriptive nature of borderline symptoms fatally undermines their reliability;

Twin studies do nothing to prove that “BPD” is transmitted through the genes, this is partly related to the non-validity of BPD and partly to methodological problems with twin studies;

There is no evidence that a constitutional deficit in regulating emotions exists in “borderlines”;

Because BPD is invalid and unreliable, biological researchers studying “it” are doomed to roam a circular labyrinth. They will continue to generate false hypotheses and misleading conclusions based on the illusory imposition of a “borderline” cluster of symptoms onto random mixes of severely distressed people.

Psychiatrists will continue clinging to the existence of “BPD” and other personality disorders. If they were to admit that BPD et al. are unscientific fabrications, their status as “experts” would be undermined.

It will be recalled that my young self had feared BPD as an incurable, genetically-based “illness”. By the time I was twenty-five, my thinking had evolved radically. If the placeholder “BPD” was a nonexistent ghost, then many of these ideas ceased to have meaning. It didn’t make sense anymore to worry about getting better from “BPD.” One cannot become free from a condition that is not diagnostically valid; one cannot be cured of something that cannot be reliably identified; genes cannot cause a fictitious disorder; medication and therapy cannot be compared for the treatment of a speculative phenomenon, and so on.

This is how I think about “Borderline Personality Disorder” now – as a ghost, a fiction, a figment of psychiatrists’ imaginations. In asserting this, I am never saying people’s painful experiences are not real. They absolutely are. But affirming people’s pain is very different from arguing that Borderline Personality Disorder exists as a distinct “illness”.

Further Emotional Growth

As I increasingly separated from the label “borderline”, further emotional growth took place. Based on my work teaching children, I started my own business, which involved advertising, accounting, hiring staff, and communications. I moved into my own house, living independently for the first time, while continuing to socialize more. I was happy a lot of the time.

In my late twenties, I had my first real relationship with a woman. She was an attractive college girl; we had several interests in common and got along well. After the hopelessness stemming from my abuse and the BPD label, loving another person had seemed like an impossible dream. I was glad to be proved wrong – loving her was better than I had ever imagined! This relationship was a first in many ways, teaching me a lot about emotional and physical intimacy.

I realized how, during the long years dominated by fear, despair, and anger, I had missed out on the best things in life. I realized that believing in “Borderline Personality Disorder” had only held me back.

A New Way of Thinking

If BPD didn’t exist, how could I understand my past “borderline” symptoms? The black and white thinking, emptiness, despair, fear, and rage had been very real. To understand them without the BPD label, I needed a new model of reality. I started by picturing distressing thoughts and feelings existing along a continuum of severity.

In my new thinking, each symptom was no longer “borderline” or “not borderline”; rather, my feelings and thoughts were the result of my family experience and everything that came from it. In particular, I needed to understand how my father’s physical abuse and my mother’s lack of emotional availability had contributed to my problems. In this way my past started to hold meaning (whereas, calling myself “borderline” didn’t really explain anything).

I modeled some of my thinking after Lawrence Hedges, a California-based psychologist. He rejects the DSM labels in favor of a system called “Listening Perspectives”. In this model, a person uses different ways of relating to other people at different points in time. Hedges describes these levels as “organizing (a term to replace ‘psychotic’)”, “symbiotic (to replace borderline)”, “self-other (for narcissistic)”, and “independence (for neurotic-healthy)”.

These terms do not denote distinct “disorders”, but rather fluid ways ofrelating which fade into one another along a continuum, which evolve based on environmental input, and which always involve others. A person will operate in different parts of this continuum at different times and with different people. In this model, one would never “have” a borderline or psychotic “disorder”; the words “organizing” and “symbiotic” would have no meaning outside of a specific relational context. The focus is on understanding and changing restrictive ways of relating, not on labeling or managing “illness”.

I probably lost some people here! This way of thinking is not proven science, but it works for me, and it’s far better than believing in the static, hopeless “Borderline Personality Disorder.” I mostly don’t even think about BPD now, because it’s not worth my time. I’m more interested in real things!

Helping Others Break Free

Two years ago, I revisited some internet forums about BPD that I had first seen as a teenager. To my surprise, these forums were alive and well; more people than ever were discussing such weighty topics as:

What’s the best way to manage “your borderline”?

You know you’re a borderline when…. (fill in the blank)

Can I have borderline, schizoid, and antisocial PDs at once?

Are borderlines more sexual than the average person?

Why won’t my family take my BPD seriously?

Do borderlines have a conscience?

Are borderlines more sensitive than the average person?

If BPD is biologically based, why do people blame us for our behavior?

How do you fill your spare time when you have BPD?

If these weren’t so sad, they would be funny (well, some of them are darkly humorous, but let’s not go there…). Anyway, hundreds of people were discussing how to “live with BPD”, “manage this illness”, “learn to accept my diagnosis”, and other twisted medical-model jargon. The level of distortion inherent in these questions is so massive that I will not even begin to discuss them; the reader can infer my opinion from the preceding paragraphs. It’s tragic that already-traumatized people are fed these lies about BPD being an “illness” they’ll have for life; for many it will only make the path to wellness harder in the long run.

After seeing these forums, I started a website telling my story of hope and critiquing the medical model of BPD. This project has allowed me to learn from other people so diagnosed. Talking with them has only reinforced my conviction that people labeled “borderline” don’t have the same “illness”. Rather, they are unique individuals, most of whom have had very difficult lives. Almost all of them want to understand their problems and get better; they are basically good people with good hearts. I would never want to label any of them “borderline.” My messages to them are,

1) Full recovery and healing from so-called “borderline” symptoms is absolutely possible, and
2) You don’t have to understand yourself through the invalid label “BPD”.

For some reason, people like these ideas a lot better than the prospect of managing a life-long “personality disorder”.

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Coda

I will finish this article with a scene the movie Inception:

“You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.” My goal is for more people to be able to say that to the idea that they can’t overcome the borderline label. The “enemies” in this movie could symbolize my fears of having BPD for life and never becoming truly well. To be able to dream bigger, I had to explode these distortions with more positive experiences and with better data, as symbolized by Tom Hardy’s big gun!

For the purpose of understanding psychiatric problems in a more nuanced and optimistic way, here is a diagram from Donald Rinsley’s book Treatment of the Severely Disturbed Adolescent:

Please click on the picture to see it larger. Each row corresponds vertically to the rows above and below in describing degrees of emotional development, and each row describes emotional growth over time from left to right. The majority of the text in brown is Rinsley’s own diagram; the bottom additions in white are mine.

Donald Rinsley was among the most respected authorities on borderline and narcissistic conditions in the second half of the 20th century. He was a psychodynamic therapist who ran a psychiatric hospital for severely troubled adolescents in Topeka, Kansas in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. He later worked extensively with personality-disordered and psychotic adults in an outpatient psychotherapy practice.

I believe that much can be learned from studying Rinsley’s diagram. It explains how psychiatric diagnoses were originally understood in psychodynamic theory – as problems in relating and functioning that occur along a continuum of severity and merge into one another. In other words, psychiatric conditions are not distinct disease entities; there are no clear lines that separate one from another.

At the upper and lower ends of each “disorder”, one cannot confidently say that a person is, for example, a higher level borderline versus a lower-level narcissist, since the conditions fade into one another. Note how the arrows denoting each region don’t stop before running into each other; they overlap.

In this row, Rinsley lists phases of healthy child development that, when interrupted, can cause arrests in emotional development – i.e. psychiatric problems. Roughly, autism (which does not refer to autism as understood today) refers to the earliest period when a baby is unaware of the external world and feels fused with its mother at a body-level. Symbiosis is when the child starts to relate in a back-and-forth need-fulfilling way with its mother.

During differentiation, the baby realizes that it is separate from its mother psychologically as well as physically. In practicing, the child discovers and explores the external world via its newfound ability to walk. And in rapprochement, the child develops a good relationship to the mother as a separate person and faces conflicts around dependency/attachment and independence/autonomous functioning.

In these descriptions, “mother” is synonymous with “caretaker”, “parental figures”, and “the external world of people”. In the object constancy phase, the mother is finally perceived as a mixture of good and bad qualities, meaning that splitting is overcome,, and the child is increasingly able to regulate their emotions. It is this achievement that is lacking in borderline conditiions. For progression through these phases to occur, it is crucial that good-enough mothering be consistently available; otherwise the child can get “stuck” in a certain phase.

There is one area where I disagree with Rinsley. I don’t think it’s possible to put the phases of infantile development into a neat timeframe (as Rinsley attempts to do by saying that object constancy takes over in healthy toddlers at around 24 months, for example). I think children’s development is highly individual and that aspects of these phases continue to be worked on long after the first few years of life, even in emotionally healthy children.

Row 2: States of Self-Object Fusion or Differentiation

In this row, Rinsley indicates whether a person sees themselves and others as fused (indistinguishable from each other; this is a psychotic state), split (self images experienced as separate from images of other people, but viewed as all-good or all-bad, a borderline state), or integrated (seeing a mix of good and bad qualities within both self images and images of other people, a neurotic/healthy state). Roughly, fused self/object images relate to “psychotic” states, split images to “borderline” or “narcissistic” states, and integrated images to “neurotic” or healthy states of minds.

Row 3: Specific Diagnostic Categories

Here Rinsley lists diagnostic labels that correspond vertically with the phases of child development and self-object differentiation from the higher rows: Autistic-presymbiotic schizophrenia, symbiotic schizophrenia, bipolar disorders, borderline personality, narcissistic personality, neuroses, etc. I will not describe specifically what these diagnoses mean; the reader who is familiar with DSM categories will recognize them.

The crucial thing is that the diagnoses overlap along a spectrum and thus are not distinct illnesses. Rinsley conceptualized diagnoses as morphing into one another as treatment progressed; for example, one could start treatment at an upper-level schizophrenic, become a “borderline” a year or two later, then become narcissistic, and finally end up functioning at a neurotic, essentially healthy level after several years.

As conceived by Rinsley, diagnoses never represented fixed “illnesses” that one had to have for life. Treatment could change diagnosis; there was the prospect of transformation. American psychiatry has fallen far from this viewpoint with its current pessimistic views of rigidly separate “mental illnesses” that one can only “manage.”

This reminds me of how many years ago, I attended a National Alliance of Mental Illness meeting. At this session people talked about how mental illnesses were “brain diseases” that one could “learn to live with”. Even back then I thought that was a pathetic, limiting idea. Who wants to just “manage their illness” when they could become truly well? Having realistic hope that one can transform oneself is so much more motivating! In my opinion NAMI is not to be trusted, due to their reliance on drug company funding. This funding implies a tie to the hopelessness of the disease categories of modern-day psychiatry.

Row 4: Major Diagnostic Categories

Here Rinsley lists the broad diagnostic regions: firstly, psychoses, which include schizophrenias, bipolar disorders, and some lower-level borderline conditions. These conditions represent emotional arrests in the earliest developmental periods. They include people who have fused images of themselves and other people; i.e. the person cannot distinguish between themselves and other people at an emotional level (and they see themselves and others as all-good and all-bad).

The second group is characterological (personality) disorders. These include the borderline, narcissistic, and also schizoid disorders. These also exist on a continuum and flow into one another. They feature splitting as their primary defenses Such people can emotionally perceive differences between themselves and other people, but they still see themselves and others as all-good or all-bad. The shorthand “G (S O)” with the space behind S and O mean that good self and object images are perceived as separate from each other, but are not integrated with bad self and object images. By contrast, in the psychotic conditions, with S-O, the dash between S and O means that the person experiences a lack of separation or differentiation between images of themselves and other people; they cannot emotionally tell where they end and other people begin. This “fusion” phenomenon occurs in some people who gets labeled with severe borderline conditions, which are partly psychotic, but it is a chronic condition in schizophrenic states.

Finally, in the last major diagnostic group, the psychoneuroses, the psychic structure gets reorganized so that splitting is eliminated and the person can see good and bad qualities coexisting in both their self-image and in their images of others. The shorthand S (G B) means that good and bad qualities are perceived together in oneself and others without splitting.

Row 5: Quality of Internalized Self-Object Images

This row describes how supportive or comforting the person’s internalized images of other people are. The more positive experiences a person has had, the further to the right hand of this continuum they are likely to be. Unstable archaic images refer to states where a person feels psychologically unstable because they are not comforted by sufficient positive memories / internalized good experiences. This corresponds to psychotic conditions and to lower level borderline states. This deficit is the reason for the commonly cited inability to regulate emotions in Borderline Personality Disorder. I wrote about this in my article on Gerald Adler’s insufficiency model:

The “stable archaic introjects” refers to when a person uses splitting, but the positive images are predominant most of the time over the negative, so the person can regulate their feelings better. This corresponds to higher level borderline and narcissistic conditions.

Lastly, differentiated self and object states refer to the ability to see good and bad in the same self or other-image. In this way people can consistently be perceived as mixtures of good and bad. This makes truly mature relationships possible based on genuine caring and interest in the other person, as opposed to mainly using people for what they can do for you (as with narcissistic conditions), or being so deficient in supportive introjects that one has trouble comforting oneself or trusting others at all (as in borderline and psychotic states).

In this row, I listed Jeffrey Seinfeld’s four phases in a way that corresponds vertically to the horizontal continuums in the rows above. Borderline states are associated either with the upper part of the out-of-contact phase, or more frequently, with the ambivalent symbiotic phase. As one progresses into the therapeutic symbiotic phase – corresponding to being able to trust and feel supported emotionally by other people consistently – one stops being “borderline” and progresses toward healthier narcissistic and neurotic levels of functioning. It occurs to me that it’s too bad these words still sound pathological and negative. Again, we need better words to describe challenges in relating and functioning, words to give people hope of becoming fulfilled and well, not just managing an “illness”.

Please see the article below for a detailed description of Seinfeld’s four phases. Understanding the relative strengths of positive and negative self/object images explains how schizophrenic states can evolve into BPD, which can evolve into NPD, which can evolve into neurosis/healthy personalities, etc. Really, all of these conditions represents problems with adapting and managing life problems; rather than “brain diseases” Given sufficient support, all of these conditions can evolve or morph into one another along the left-to-right continuum of emotional growth. Here are Seinfeld’s phases:

And here is an example of how a young woman progressed through the four phases, starting in the lower-level out-of-contact “borderline” phase”, progressing through the narcissistic phase, and finishing in the neurotic-healthy part of the spectrum:

In this row, I put common DSM labels – schizophrenia, BPD, NPD, neurosis, etc. These are not truly valid illness categories, but they have some meaning if understood as part of a developmental continuum.

Below these labels, I put Lawrence Hedges’ descriptions of the four developmental levels which Seinfeld described in his phases. I haven’t written about Hedges yet, but he is my favorite psychodynamic writer along with Jeffrey Seinfeld. His descriptions of people’s problems are much more empathic, human, and hopeful than the DSM labels. More on Hedges in a later post.

My goal in this article was to give the reader a taste of how psychodynamic theorists think about schizophrenia, borderline, narcissistic, and neurotic-healthy mental states as existing along a continuum of emotional development. This viewpoint is different than the rigid DSM categories which dominate American psychiatry today.

In my opinion, this spectrum or continuum based approach, while not perfect, is more informative and realistic than rigid DSM categories. Since it is developmental, it implies the hope that one can grow beyond frozen emotional development to become emotionally mature. That’s why it’s my rough guide for thinking about “borderline” and “narcissistic” states, although I try not to use those words too much!

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I welcome any correspondance at bpdtransformation@gmail.com

If you are struggling with BPD yourself or are trying to help a borderline individual, I would be happy to listen to your story and provide feedback if possible. Feel free to provide constructive criticism of this site also.

This article is the opinion of a non-professional layperson, and should not be taken as medical advice or as the view of a therapist who is professionally qualified to treat Borderline Personality Disorder or any other mental health condition. Readers should consult with a qualified mental health professional before undertaking any treatment.

This post will answer critics who say: “Borderlines are not motivated to attend therapy. Borderline patients don’t stay in treatment. At best, therapy can manage but not cure BPD.”

These statements are absolutely false. Yet these myths continue to appear online, often being communicated to people recently diagnosed. As the studies below demonstrate, most people diagnosed with BPD do want help, most will stay in good treatment, and most do recover to different degrees.

Earlier posts have elaborated my dim view of the (non) validity of the BPD diagnosis. Since it cites studies using the BPD construct, this post might be viewed as hypocritical. That may be a valid criticism! Nevertheless, these studies provide evidence that people with “borderline symptoms”, however defined, can be motivated and recover both with and without therapy

Study 1: 88 Borderline Patients Treated Twice a Week for Three Years

Highlights: Led by Josephine Giesen at Maastricht University, Dutch researchers treated 88 borderline patients for three years with twice-weekly psychotherapy. Patients were randomly assigned to either Schema-Focused Therapy or Transference-Focused Psychotherapy, which are described in detail below.

After three years, a large majority of patients showed significant improvement, with many considered fully recovered and no longer diagnosable as borderline. In the group of 45 patients undergoing Schema-Focused therapy, more than half were no longer diagnosable as borderline after three years, and many more had improved significantly.

The researchers commented, “These treatments demonstrate that patients with BPD can be motivated for and continue prolonged outpatient treatment… Three years of treatment proved to bring about a significant change in patients’ personality, shown by reductions in all BPD symptoms, increases in quality of life, and changes in associated personality features.”

Here are details from the study:

Patient Population: 88 Dutch patients diagnosed with BPD. Average age around 30 years, with most patients in their 20s or 30s. Over 90% of patients were female. The group had average educational levels for Holland; about half had attended some college or completed a degree. As for functioning before treatment, around 50% were on state disability, 20% were working, and the remainder were students or stay-at-home wives/mothers.

Trauma in Patients’ Histories: Over 85% of the patients reported childhood physical abuse. About 90% reported childhood emotional abuse or neglect. More than 60% also reported sexual abuse. Over half the patients had seriously contemplated or attempted suicide within three months before treatment. About three-quarters were taking some type of psychiatric medication.

Intervention: For a three-year period, patients attended two 50-minute sessions per week of either Schema-Focused Therapy (SFT) or Transference-Focused Psychotherapy (TFP). Treatment occurred at outpatient medical centers in four Dutch cities. The type of therapy given was randomized.

Definition of Schema-Focused Therapy: SFT is a psychodynamic treatment which assumes the existence of schemas (mental models of relationships) expressed in pervasive patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. The distinguished modes in BPD are detached protector, punitive parent, abandoned/abused child, and angry/impulsive child. Change is achieved through a range of behavioral, cognitive, and experiential techniques that focus on (1) the therapeutic relationship, (2) daily life outside therapy and (3) past traumatic experiences. Recovery in SFT is achieved when dysfunctional schemas no longer control the patient’s life.

Definition of Transference-Focused Therapy: TFP is a psychoanalytically-derived therapy which focuses on the transference relationship between patient and therapist. Prominent techniques are exploration, confrontation, and interpretation. Recovery in TFP is reached when good and bad representations of self and others are integrated and when fixed primitive internalized object relations are resolved.

Therapist Composition: 44 different therapists treated the 88 patients. Over 90% of the therapists had doctoral or master’s level training. All therapists had previous treatment experience with BPD patients. Therapists averaged 10 years of experience working with borderline individuals.

Outcome Measures: Patient progress was assessed every 3 months for 3 years. The primary outcome measure was the BPDSI-IV, a 70-item scale measuring the severity and frequency of borderline symptoms. Patients also completed regular quality-of-life questionnaires. These included the World Health Organization quality of life assessment, a 100-item questionnaire covering level of satisfaction with interpersonal relationships, level of independent functioning, psychological wellbeing, and physical health.

Dropout Rate: Of 45 patients treated with Schema Therapy, only 11 dropped out during the entire 3-year period. So 75% of this group persevered in intensive therapy for at least three years.

Of 43 patients treated with Transference-Focused Therapy, 18 dropped out during the 3-year period. However, the study notes that 10 of these 18 drop outs disliked the therapy method or their therapist, and 5 of 18 had issues around TFP’s method of enforcing contracts. Many of these dropouts occurred in the first few months. In my opinion, TFP is a more rigid, less effective form of treatment, and so it’s unsurprising that more patients dropped out. There’s no reason these patients couldn’t do better in another treatment.

Understanding Improvement in these BPD Patients

So how was improvement in these patients measured?

To answer this, one has to understand the measures used in the study. The primary gauge was the BPDSI-IV scale, which was filled out by patients every three months for three years. The BPDSI consists of 70 items arranged in 9 subscales. For each of the 9 DSM symptoms, 7-8 questions are asked to determine how severe and frequent the behaviors/feelings have been over the past three months, from the patient’s perspective. Each question is rated on an 11-point scale, running from 0 (never, not at all, low) to 10 (daily, very intensely, high).

For example, several questions would ask about the intensity/frequency of a patient’s feelings of emptiness (DSM BPD criteria #7), several questions would ask about the intensity/frequency of a patient’s suicidal thinking/behavior (DSM criteria #5), several questions would ask about how unstable or intense the patient feels their relationships to be (criteria #2), and so on.

The scores relating to each symptom are then averaged, producing an overall rating for that symptom. (For example, the scores for all questions about emptiness would be averaged to produce one “emptiness score”, a number between 0 and 10.) These 9 average rating for the 9 symptoms (numbers between 0 and 10) are added up to give a “BPDSI-IV” score, which represents the severity of the patient’s borderline problems over the last three months. This number will be anywhere between 0 and 90, with 0 being perfect mental health and 90 being the severest borderline disorder.

Although I dislike the BPD diagnosis, I don’t mind the method used in this study, because it involves asking the “borderline” patients how they feel. In other words, the BPDSI scale is not a judgment by clinicians, it’s a report from patients.

Improvement in BPDSI and Quality of Life Scales during the first year:

With this understanding in mind, here is how the patients did over the first year:

In the top left graph, we see that in the schema therapy group (line with squares), the patients started out at an average BPDSI rating of around 35 (out of 90, with 90 being the most severe, representing the worst rating for each of the 9 BPD symptoms), but this had dropped to almost 15 by the end of the first year. The patients in the transference therapy group also improved, but a little less so.

The other measures are as follows:

The bottom left Euro-QOL scale is a measure of the patient’s subjective feeling of well-being on a scale from 0 to 100, with 100 being the best. We can see that it improved significantly for both patient groups over the first year.

The top right WHO-QOL scale is another quality of life scale, and the bottom right scale is a measure of psychopathology, neither of which I researched in depth. But the trend lines in each case are positive

Outcome In Terms of Symptom Reduction

Now let’s take a look at how the patients did in terms of each of the 9 BPD symptoms. Here is the graph of the treatment groups’ averages for symptom severity over time:

The left-hand numbers on each graph represent the average BPDSI rating for the group for that symptom. For example, for item C (top right), the “Identity Disturbance” rating (DSM symptom #3) started at an average of 5 out of a worst-possible rating of 10. This rating is an average for all the patients in the group. It then drops to an average of less than 2 out of 10 after the first year, an impressive reduction.

Average group ratings over time for all 9 BPD symptoms can be seen. From the top left, the items are: Abandonment score, Unstable Relationships sore, Identity Disturbance, Impulsivity, Suicidality, Emotional Instability, Emptiness, Anger, and Paranoid/Dissociative Tendencies. All of these ratings are from the patients’ perspective. The reader can see that in every case the trend is positive (symptoms getting less intense and frequent).

Detailed Outcomes Over Three Years

Lastly, here is data showing the patients’ progress over three years:

We can see that the patients improved a lot in the first two years, and tended to maintain that improvement between years two and three. I don’t interpret this pessimistically. After a significant period of early improvement, there is often a time where a person works to become more secure in their new level of functioning and relating. This may partly account for the “leveling off” of the scores between years two and three. If the patients continued in treatment (or on their own), they could improve further.

After three years, at least half of the Schema therapy group’s patients had recovered to the point where they felt well enough to no longer be considered “borderline”, and more than two-thirds were considered highly improved. “Recovery” was defined in this study as achieving a BPDSI score of lower than 15 out of 90, and maintaining that level through the end of the study. Other patients who improved a lot (e.g. going from a BPDSI rating of 50+ down to 25 or 20) would only barely be diagnosable as borderline, even if they weren’t considered “fully recovered”.

These studies tend to be very binary (e.g. people are either “recovered” or “not recovered”, but reality is not like that). It’s important to remember that improvement is a process; it’s never all or nothing!

Jeffrey Young’s Comments

Dr. Jeffrey Young of Columbia University is the developer of Schema Therapy for BPD. He commented on this study as follows: “With Schema Therapy, patients with BPD are now breaking free from lives of chaos and misery. Not only are they learning skills to stop self-harming behaviors, as they have with Dialectical Behavior Therapy, but a high percentage of BPD patients are finally making deeper personality changes that have not been possible until now.”

For Young, this study demonstrates that therapy for BPD can lead to full recovery, and that longer-term psychodynamic therapy can be very effective. However, his comment might be a little grandiose, as people with borderline symptoms made “deeper personality changes” long before he invented Schema Therapy.

Young’s group added that this intensive schema therapy may have advantages over Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. According to Young, “DBT relieves many of the self-destructive behavioral symptoms of the disorder, but may not reduce other core symptoms, especially those related to deeper personality change.”

Interestingly, Young noted that part of schema therapy’s success may involve its emphasis on “limited reparenting”, i.e. on the creation of a loving relationship between patient and therapist. This is closely related to what I discussed in article #10, in the phase of Therapeutic Symbiosis:

I am by no means an expert on Schema Therapy, and I have no affiliation with Dr. Young. My understanding is that SFT involves a mix of cognitive-behavioral and psychodynamic techniques. It focuses on building a positive therapeutic relationship, on better managing daily life, and on working through past traumatic experiences. These elements are common to most therapies.

Schema therapy also contains an object-relations (psychoanalytic) foundation, in that it conceptualizes the borderline patient as using “schemas” in their mind to represent and relate to themselves and others. Examples of these are punishing parent and angry child, uncaring parent and abandoned child, etc.

Schema therapy helps the borderline patient understand how these faulty models developed – often due to trauma and poor parenting – and to stop the replaying of negative past interactions from destroying the potential for new, better relationships in the present. In this sense, it is based on Fairbairn’s object relations model, discussed below.

As Fairbairn said, “The psychotherapist is the true successor to the exorcist. His business is not to pronounce the forgiveness of sins, but to cast out devils.” 🙂

How Individuals Get Lost in Group Studies

My biggest criticism of this type of study is that it obscures individuals’ experiences behind numbers and averages. Of course, its intent is not to provide individual detail. But,I would like to hear from individual patients what their life experience was like at the end of treatment compared to the beginning. I’m sure many would speak very positively about their progress. Since we don’t have that, I recommend the reader to case studies referenced in these posts:

In the bigger picture, this study’s results are obvious. Intensive help helps people, just like the sky is blue and the sun rises in the east. “Borderlines” are no exception to this. If they can access effective support – and are given a reasonable sense of hope – people diagnosed with BPD will do very well. What we need to be doing is getting more people access to effective treatment, and leaving behind the outdated myths that BPD is untreatable or incurable.

It’s amazing how such common sense escapes people who say, “borderlines don’t seek help, borderlines won’t stay in treatment, borderlines can’t be cured etc.” In my opinion, they are about as well-informed as people who think the Earth is flat.

Patient Population: 290 patients diagnosed with BPD, assessed at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts. They were first treated as inpatients during brief hospital stays.

Method of Study: This was a longitudinal-observational study. The patients were interviewed every two years for at least 10 consecutive years, starting in the early 1990s. During interviews, their level of functioning in work/school, satisfaction with interpersonal relationships, and degree and frequency of borderline symptoms were measured. After 10 years, 90% of the original cohort of 290 patients were still participating.

Therefore, this study followed the “natural course” of BPD. This medical-model idea is misleading (the notion that BPD has a “natural course”), but I won’t go into that now. Suffice it to say that the researchers in this study did not “treat” the patients – they just followed them after hospitalization and went to great lengths to see how they were doing every two years.

High Remission of Symptoms: After 10 years, 93% of the formerly borderline patients had experienced at least two consecutive years during which they no longer qualified for the BPD diagnosis, according to DSM criteria:

Low Recurrence of Symptoms: After 10 years, among the 93% of patients who achieved symptomatic remission, only 29% became “borderline” again. In other words, once they improved to the point of no longer being diagnosable as borderline, a large majority did not get worse and become “borderline” again:

Good Social and Work Functioning: After 10 years, 78% of patients had achieved good psychosocial functioning – defined as good performance in a job for at least two years, along with at least one emotionally sustaining relationship with a partner or friend:

To me this last slide is questionable, as it’s not clear how “good work performance” was defined (and a certain period of work is not a prerequisite for “recovery”, anyway). Nevertheless, this study shows how, in a group of previously hospitalized borderlines, most people improve to the point where they are able to function in a job and have an intimate relationship. Again, the study authors provided these patients with no treatment beyond brief hospitalization, although many probably sought help on their own.

Other Longitudinal Studies of Borderlines Are Also Positive

There are many other ways to critique this study; for example, one could say it only applies to “borderlines” in the northeastern United States who went through McLean hospital. However, other studies following borderline patients for decades reach similar conclusions.

These include Thomas McGlashan’s Chestnut Lodge study (Maryland, USA), Michael Stone’s “Fate of Borderline Patients” study (New York, USA), and Joel Paris’ longitudinal study of borderlines (Montreal, Canada). All of these studies concluded that a large majority of borderline patients improved significantly, and many recovered in the long term. Collectively these studies included over a thousand patients. These studies can be found by searching online, as well as through the books by McGlashan, Stone, and Paris on Amazon.

The Limitations of Naturalistic Studies Based on Diagnosis

The anti-psychiatry side of me says that these longitudinal studies reveal what a meaningless and unreliable diagnosis BPD is. It doesn’t make sense that some percentage of people are initially borderline, then at varying points in time they are suddenly no longer borderline, then a few of them are borderline again, and so on.

Maybe BPD was never a valid illness to begin with. But such common sense seems to escape Harvard-educated researchers like Zanarini 🙂 Then again, to admit that what they’re studying is an unscientific fabrication wouldn’t be great for their careers, nor for receiving funding from the National Institute of Mental Health.

Although these studies have flaws, I hope readers will see that people diagnosed with BPD do seek help, and that they can recover to be emotionally well and free of “borderline” symptoms. These are not just opinions. They’re facts.

On The Nature of Quasi-Experiments

Lastly, it is important to understand that these studies – like most in psychology – are quasi-experimental. This means they are not perfectly controlled experiments, because when studying human beings many factors simply cannot be controlled. One can never study a person as reliably as one studies solar radiation or the molecular structure of uranium.

No one quasi-study can “prove” a point definitively. Nevertheless, quasi-experimental studies can estimate the effect of a variable(s) on a group of people under certain conditions. And a pattern of quasi-studies with similar results can show that something real is happening

These studies should also not be interpreted as applying to any particular person. Rather, they are averages of many different people’s outcomes, and only have meaning on a group level.

Wow, I am exhausted thinking about all this data. Time to get a beer!

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I welcome any correspondance at bpdtransformation@gmail.com

If you are struggling with BPD yourself or are trying to help a borderline individual, I would be happy to listen to your story and provide feedback if possible. Feel free to provide constructive criticism of this site also.

This article is the opinion of a non-professional layperson, and should not be taken as medical advice or as the view of a therapist who is professionally qualified to treat Borderline Personality Disorder or any other mental health condition. Readers should consult with a qualified mental health professional before undertaking any treatment.

“Mood disorders are biologically-based mental illnesses”, the psychiatrist announced authoritatively, surveying the 15 young-adult patients in front of him. “But while these illnesses might be biological, it doesn’t mean you can’t manage them effectively.”

My mind reacted explosively: How the fuck could you possibly know this, you pathetic excuse for a mental health “professional”? What actual evidence do you have?!

I desperately wanted to shout at him. But I remained silent, slouching backward in my chair in the mental hospital’s group therapy room.

After concocting a suicide plan that almost succeeded, I had been involuntarily committed to this hospital for my own protection. But I was now becoming a captive of a different kind: a prisoner of psychiatry’s hopeless ideology.

This is the story of my time in a mental hospital – what it taught me about myself, about my fellow human beings with “mental illnesses”, and about the web of lies that is American psychiatry.

Descent Into Hell

In my early 20s, having suspended my college career, I returned home to live with my family. Living three hours away at college had become increasingly difficult – I felt isolated, depressed, scared, and hopeless. I couldn’t live on my own – my father’s physical abuse, and the lack of love in our family, had left me not knowing how to make friends, date girls, or feel secure living alone. But once I got home, the feelings of hopelessness continued unabated.

It’s hard to describe how bad things were to someone who hasn’t experienced these feelings. I remember wishing that I could escape my mind and teleport into the body of another person whose mind was not as “diseased”. I read Dante’s The Inferno, and felt that I was literally living out the punishments of those condemned to the seven circles of hell.

Something felt profoundly unstable and “wrong” at the core of my being. It frequently felt as if my existence was under threat, that my core self might at any moment disintegrate. I remember reading an astronomy book describing how comets orbited the event horizons of black holes, constantly at risk of being sucked in and destroyed forever. That was how I felt.

To put these feelings into a more understandable context, they were based on the belief that I had no chance of a successful adult future. I saw other young people having relationships with the opposite sex, but I had no idea how to talk to a girl at the time. I couldn’t think clearly about getting a degree or starting a career, because getting through the next day felt overwhelming, let alone concentrating on schoolwork. I couldn’t enjoy anything – movies, reading, friends, etc. The all-consuming anxiety made every day a struggle.

Suicidal Intent

This horrific state of emotional affairs set the stage for me to become seriously suicidal. After returning home, I decided that I had tried everything and didn’t deserve to suffer like this. I formulated a plan to end my life, which won’t be elaborated except to say that it involved a lethal method and might have succeeded. I prepared loving letters for my family and friends, and planned the date I would end everything.

After I made my suicide plan, I remember walking outside during a sunset. We lived near the ocean at the time. In my fragmented state of mind, I looked at the beautiful sea, the sunlight glinting off the waves, and felt an overwhelming sadness. Part of me was urging myself to find a way to survive, but I couldn’t see any hope. Despite the despair, I still appreciated the natural beauty of the ocean.

My Plan Fails

My plan failed because I am a bad liar. My friends noticed that I had withdrawn socially, was barely communicating, and had stopped taking physical care of myself. All my energy was focused on ensuring the suicide attempt’s success by planning it down to the smallest detail. But knowing my history of abuse, my closest friend sensed something was wrong. When he asked me what was going on, I denied any suicidal intent. But the next day, he found an opportunity to look through my bedroom while I was out of the house. Showing a remarkable sixth sense, he rapidly located my suicide notes stashed in the side pocket of an old backpack. I will always owe him for this.

When I returned home, my friend had told my parents everything and the emergency psychiatric response team was rushing to our house. I was completely taken by surprise. Two policemen and two psychiatric specialists soon entered our house and questioned me. I tried to deny that I was actually planning to kill myself, but it was no use.

After a brief discussion, I was led out of the house – in handcuffs – and put in the back of a police car. I was to be taken to the local emergency room, since space was not yet available at the mental hospital. The police explained that I was not being arrested; handcuffing someone was their protocol when someone is involuntarily committed to a mental facility. This made little sense, but I was in no position to question them.

The Emergency Room

The next day or so is a blur. I had to stay overnight at the hospital emergency room, where I could not sleep because of nurses talking loudly. A guard constantly watched my room; at one point he explained that I was being put on a “5150 hold”, which meant I was to be detained for at least 72 hours for evaluation. My mind churned the whole night, going through endless scenarios: Where was I going? What were my parents thinking right now? How dare my friend get them to call the police without asking me? Am I crazy? Should I lie to the doctors, get out of the hospital, and follow through on my suicide plan? Had I been wrong to give up hope? Might hospitalization not give me some time to find a better escape, one that allowed me to survive and live? Shouldn’t I give myself another chance? How could life be so hard?

The Mental Hospital

In the morning the guard told me to get ready because we were going to the psychiatric hospital. I expected to travel normally in a car, but instead I was strapped to a hospital stretcher and rolled into the back of a locked ambulance. I had the humiliating sense of being a prisoner, with everyone knowing why I was held hostage – because I was crazy and wanted to kill myself. The trip took almost an hour; at this point I hadn’t slept for about 36 hours. We finally arrived at the hospital, where I was wheeled inside a self-locking gate that led into “the ward”.

A Moment of Humor

Despite my horrible mental state, part of me was fascinated to see inside a real-life “asylum” for the first time. I was thinking about the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which I had recently seen. The ambulance drivers were pushing my stretcher along a hallway, taking me for evaluation in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) – the place for the hospital’s craziest patients, as well as those arriving for initial assessment.

As we turned a corner, we came upon a long-haired, wild-looking young man. He looked like a young Jon Bon Jovi and wore an ill-fitting blue hospital gown. Four or five nurses faced him with looks of frustration on their faces.

“You’re nothing but a bunch of vaginas and penises to me!” shouted the young man in a loud, high-pitched voice. “Vaginas and penises! That’s all you are! You can go fuck each other for all I care! Go fuck each other, you hear me? What do you think about that, you motherfuckers?”

I could not help smiling at this. I was thinking, What kind of place is this? Are these people all crazy?

The nurses tried to convince him to go to his room, but the patient continued his verbal assault, eventually challenging a male nurse to fight him in single combat. At this point, two of the male nurses forcibly wrestled him to the ground. They pulled up his gown, and a female nurse plunged a syringe into his bare bottom. It must have been a fast-acting tranquilizer. With this done, the male nurses dragged his limp body to a nearby room.

I made a mental note not to call the nurses “vaginas and penises.”

The Strange Ward

Upon arrival, I was assessed by a series of nurses, who asked questions like the following:

“Are you planning to hurt yourself right now?” (No…)
“What’s your height and weight?” (6’2, 175)
“Are you carrying any weapon or sharp object?” (No… Of course, they had to body-check me)
“Will you tell us if you start feeling like you want to hurt yourself?” (Yes…)“Are you feeling pain anywhere in your body?” (No…)

It was all so awkward. No one asked why I was there, or what had been going on to make me suicidal. They said the psychiatrist would talk to me. I had to fill out a superficial anxiety and depression questionnaire, and was then shown to my room.

The ward was a spartan place of accommodation. The rooms didn’t differ much from prison cells seen on shows like MSNBC’s Lockup. Each room had a small, uncomfortable bed bolted to the floor along with a basic toilet. They also had some old wooden cabinets, which made them luxurious compared to jail! Almost nothing else was in the room. Every 15 minutes, all day and all night long, a nurse would come to check that I hadn’t discovered some ingenious way to hurt myself. This made it hard to sleep at night.

Soon I wondered into the ward’s common area, a large square space with old sofas and a TV. Ten or twelve mostly young adults were sitting there, watched by three or four nurses. Some were staring into space, others watched the TV, one woman was talking to herself. Everyone seemed to be quietly doing their own thing. I had no interest in talking to anyone at first. I thought they were all crazy and hoped I didn’t become like them.

A nearby board listed group therapy sessions that occurred each day. I cannot remember what type of therapy they all were, but there was at least one Dialectical Behavior Therapy and one Cognitive Behavioral Therapy session.

Group Therapy

I went to a couple of these group therapies the first day. The CBT session featured a young psychology intern lecturing. He drew pictures explaining how thoughts, feelings, body, and the outside world were interrelated. I found it so superficial as to be no help in understanding anything (I was in a very negative mindset at the time). I wondered why they were not asking people to tell their own stories, or at least for their responses to the information provided.

I would soon find that exactly the same lecture was repeated every two days, with no variation based on the patients. Anyone new got to hear it for the first time, while everyone else got a repeat.

In the DBT session, the speaker explained the concept of wise mind, the place where emotions and thoughts overlap. He described how to distract oneself from negative feelings and be “in the moment.” He also stressed repeatedly “thoughts are not facts!”. The tone of this session annoyed me, because it felt like we were being talked down to like simple-minded children, or like computers needing to have our software reprogrammed.

The Psychiatrist

Being horribly depressed and ashamed, I was not in a mindset to appreciate these sessions anyway. I spent most of the time in my room brooding about the thwarted suicide plans, thinking bitterly about how unfair life was. On the second day, the psychiatrist assigned to my case called for me. I went into a small office to find myself facing an old man who looked like a mob boss out of the Godfather. He appeared Italian, with dark, tanned skin, and a smooth sense of accomplishment about the way he spoke.

“What’s so bad that you want to kill yourself?” he asked me.

I remained silent for a while, then told him about how depressed I was, how I couldn’t stop obsessing over negative thoughts, and how my father had physically abused me.

The psychiatrist thought about this, then asked for my family history of “mental illness.” I described how my dad had severe OCD and depression.

“It sounds like you have OCD too, plus depression” the psychiatrist said. “We have medications that will really help your obsessing, and they’ll help the depression too.” He prescribed three medications – including two antidepressants and an antipsychotic mood-stabilizer, if I remember right – all of which I was to start taking right away. At that time I didn’t know much about medications, otherwise I would have refused his prescription, or at least refused to take that many.

The psychiatrist also prescribed writing exercises. I was to “obsess” in a journal for thirty minutes a day – writing down every negative thought that came to mind. And the rest of the time I was meant to tell the negative thoughts to “go away, I’ll deal with you later!”

Toward the end of the session, I told the psychiatrist about my BPD diagnosis also. He responded that this was a tough condition that could be “comorbid” with OCD and depression. He said something like, “We don’t have a cure for borderline personality, but the symptoms can be managed”. I hated this idea right away. If I couldn’t really get better, what point was there in trying?

“These type of things can get better. We want you alive, that’s why you’re here and that’s why we’re treating you,” the psychiatrist said. I didn’t like this one bit – the messages seemed to be all confused – but it was more positive than some of the other things he said.

My View of the Psychiatrist

The psychiatrist’s worldview was alien to me. I intuitively felt that the medications would not help, while the writing exercises seemed ridiculous. The psychiatrist didn’t appear to see me as an individual. Instead he saw “borderline” and “depression” and “OCD” sitting in the chair, and he was trying to manage these “illnesses.”

When the psychiatrist said that BPD could not be cured, I felt furious. If I had a gun, I would have liked to shoot him right there and then. I imagined how satisfying it would be to put a bullet through his forehead, see his chair topple over onto the ground, the blood spilling everywhere, and for there to be one less idiot psychiatrist able to medicate patients into oblivion. It made me think of the opening scene in the movie Casino Royale, where James Bond confronts the traitorous section chief, whom he dispatches with a handgun (shown in the last 30 second of this clip):

Of course, I did not execute the psychiatrist. Nor would it have happened if I had had access to a weapon. Even in my crazy state, some part of me knew that this man probably had a family and didn’t mean badly – he just didn’t know how to understand people other than as illnesses. But my fantasies of hatred for his views were vivid, and I wanted to destroy what he stood for.

The Dead Zone

Over the next few days, I went to several more group therapy sessions, which continued to feel superficial and boring. I wanted someone to listen to my experience, not hear lectures about the mind and how to rigidly cope. But I started to become less suicidal and began talking with some of the other patients.

I continued meeting with the psychiatrist daily. He would only see me for a few minutes, asking how the medication was working and if I was having any more suicidal thoughts. I thought it was ridiculous that he was not talking to me for a longer time, getting to know me and understanding what might have caused me to become so hopeless. I would always say that I didn’t know how the medication was working, because I couldn’t possibly tell what was the effect of the medication and what was due to other factors. This frustrated him.

Before I spoke to other patients, the atmosphere on the ward often seemed stagnant, tragic, empty. It felt like being in a morgue with dead people walking around. The nurses “managed” the patients – watching them take their medications, controlling the difficult patients, coordinating mealtimes. Their were some kind nurses, but the majority seemed not to care about getting to know the patients. The most positive thing about the ward was its breakfasts – I remember we got French toast, bacon, eggs, and cereal most days!

The Other “Crazy People”

After about four days, I asked the psychiatrist when I could leave the hospital. He wanted my family to meet with the social worker and establish a plan for my starting therapy, plus establish ground rules to prevent me from hurting myself. This involved restricting my access to money for a period.

I was to stay for a few more days and, if it seemed like I was functioning ok, attending some groups, and not feeling suicidal, then I would be released. Until my release, since there was not much to do most of the time and I was feeling better, I began talking to other patients. That was one of the most interesting things about my stay. Let me describe a few of my fellow “crazy people”:

“Paul” was a big Latin-American man in his late 50’s with a jovial, outgoing personality. He spoke a little strangely, but was very friendly. He would always call me “Sir Edward” for no apparent reason. I told him about my English heritage; he was fascinated by my grandfather, a Jewish scientist who escaped from Nazi Germany. He told me how his family emigrated from South America to the US and established their own hotel business. Like me, Paul was a big racquet sports fan. We would talk about Agassi, Sampras, Federer, etc. debating who was the best. We had several table-tennis battles in the court-yard of the hospital ward. I would always beat him but it was close. I eventually asked Paul why he was there – to me, he wasn’t crazy at all. He said he had bipolar episodes, but they were now controlled with medication. I never saw any evidence of him being manic or depressed.

“Nicky” was a young woman in her early 20s. She was an attractive brunette, the kind of young woman to whom I was attracted but scared to approach. Eventually I struck up a conversation and found out that she had been hearing critical voices after using drugs, which led her to be hospitalized. She had a difficult relationship with her parents that led to the drug use and breakdown. But she kindly supported me when I told her how difficult things had been with my family. She also had coloring books which she would bring into the common area and get me to work on with her.

“Susie” was a middle-aged bipolar woman who had been experiencing hallucinations of sharp-fanged animals invading her apartment. She had had a difficult childhood with physically abusive parents. Nevertheless, she was an intelligent, interesting lady who had a successful career in a professional field. We would play board games together and she would beat me at Scrabble. I shared with her what had brought me to the ward, and she was warmly supportive. She reminded me of how important I was to my family; how hurt they would be to lose me.

“Ray” was a young man diagnosed with schizophrenia who had hallucinations and had been hospitalized several times. But he was a sweet person. It was clear that he wanted to be liked and to connect with other people, despite his “illness”. He didn’t even seem crazy to me. It turned out he had been able to work part-time on-and-off for several years, but the psychotic episodes, which I saw no overt evidence of, kept interfering with his functioning. He was on at least four or five different medications, which seemed like a lot. His mother would visit the ward every day and she clearly cared about him a bunch, sitting with him and holding him as if he were a young child. I was touched by her devotion, and introduced myself to the mother, telling her how nice I thought Ray was. I hope he got better going forward.

“Anouk” was a Middle-Eastern woman whose husband had physically assaulted her, leading her to flee from him, become severely depressed and suicidal, and eventually require hospitalization. She had a warm, motherly personality that was attractive to me at the time, lonely as I was. She told me about her five daughters and her dreams for their careers, and about how evil her husband was! She took a particular liking to me, and would give me high-fives and hugs when she saw me in the corridors. This went on even though patients weren’t meant to touch each other; somehow it seems that psychiatry has forgotten that friendly touch can be a healing thing.

“Jeanette” was another pretty girl in her early 20s. She had been admitted after running away from home and hitchhiking cross-country to “find herself”. She believed that plants had personalities and that you could be friends with them. She would keep a special hard-boiled egg in her room that had significance to her. Apart from these things, she spoke just like a normal person. I found her energetic personality quite likeable. But she was a social rebel and frequently argued with the nurses about rules. When they wouldn’t let her family bring in an I-pod, she became furious and acted out by stripping down naked and running through the common area with no clothes on! She was an absolutely gorgeous blonde. Hopefully she got better, and some lucky guy got to experience her beauty in a more private setting!

Reflections on The Patients Versus the Staff

Ironically, I got much more help from talking to patients than from the staff. The nurses mostly didn’t care about the patients as people, simply wanting to keep them under control. All the patients could sense this. The psychiatrist was worthless since we spoke only a few minutes a day about medication and practical matters.

But several patients treated me with genuine kindness. I kept in contact with a few of them afterwards via email and phone (even though the hospital warned against contacting other patients post-discharge… another stupid policy). To me, these patients didn’t have “mental illnesses”; they were just people dealing with serious challenges in living. I felt as if anyone could have reacted the way they did facing the same life challenges; but that wouldn’t make them “schizophrenic” or “borderline” or whatever. This experience influenced my thinking about BPD and other so-called “mental illnesses” being invalid diagnoses.

Several patients told me they hated taking medications, that they didn’t feel these medications helped, and that they got little out of the group therapy. One depressed man refused to take any medication; he just wanted to be there to be safe. The one good thing about the hospital – and I must acknowledge this for my own case – was that it kept me safe during a time when I might otherwise have hurt myself. For that protection I am grateful. I improved somewhat by the time of discharge, and was less of a risk to myself afterwards.

Psychiatry Doing More Harm Than Good

I believe that in many cases, mental hospitals dominated by psychiatry’s medical model do more harm than good. Ironically and perversely, psychiatry thereby becomes an obstacle to the recovery of the very people it is supposed to help. It promotes the message that people have biologically-based “illnesses” that they are stuck with for life. As I discuss in many other articles, this is a complete lie. And yet, it is presented as if it is the best that people can hope for.

Why limit people’s dreams with this type of reductionistic thinking for which there is scant evidence? Why not tell them that they are heroically dealing with understandable reactions to extremely challenging life situations, and that with understanding and love, they are likely to get better?

The answer, in large part, is that psychiatry’s reductionistic view of emotional problems as “mental illnesses” has infected the minds of most psychiatrists, who in turn infect their patients. And thus is promoted the pessimistic view of mental illness as a lifelong “disease”, rather than as a primarily psycho-social experience that can be overcome with sufficient support.

Psychiatry is also eager to prescribe as many medications as possible, which unfortunately do nothing to address the root causes of people’s problems. A prime motive is to perpetuate the billions of dollars in profit that companies like Eli Lilly, Janssen, Pfizer, etc. make, and to support the psychiatrists and shareholders allied with these companies. Helping the patient comes second, and if these patients could have done better with other forms of treatment and/or without medication, then too bad.

In my opinion, the network of drug companies and psychiatrists who weave lies about medication represent a fraudulent house of cards. Patients can protect themselves by learning just how ineffective medications really are over the long term. If more of us educate ourselves, then psychiatry will be progressively undermined. Newer studies are showing that most psychiatric drugs are barely or no more effective than placebos, and that the long-term side effects can be very dangerous. This is discussed in detail in the many articles on http://www.madinamerica.com

Lastly, the whole approach of the hospital was to “manage illness”, not promote healing and recovery. Even though there were signs on the walls extolling positive values like Hope and Responsibility, the interactions with the nurses, psychiatrists, and group therapists did not promote a sense of “we’re in this together” or “you can recover and do what you want.” Rather, the emotional message was, “You are the sick people, and we are the “normal” ones who will teach you how to manage your unfortunate afflictions.” Ironically, many of the patients were more helpful to me than the mental health professionals.

Conclusion: A Sad Reality

Such is the reality of inpatient mental health treatment for many in 21st century America. I urge people to avoid inpatient facilities wherever possible, unless they are in real danger of hurting themselves or others, in which case hospitals can provide a critical protective function. As much as possible, seek help from outpatient therapists, family, and friends who are outside of the traditional psychiatric system. I believe the chances of recovery from BPD and other conditions is greater following this path. Getting stuck in a cycle of going in and out of hospitals, being overmedicated, and being treated as if one is an illness, doesn’t promote recovery.

I would also direct readers to these websites that are great resources promoting recovery outside of the traditional psychiatric system:

http://www.madinamerica.com – Many fascinating articles about the worthlessness of psychiatric diagnosis, the ineffectiveness of medication, and the value of therapy, understanding, and love.

http://www.isps.org – The International Society for Psychological approaches to Schizophrenia and other psychoses. Many of the clinicians listed on this site are also well-trained in treating Borderline Personality Disorder. Much of their writing about psychosis could be applied to BPD. They are an extremely empathic, innovative, and optimistic group.

Feel free to share any experiences you have with “the psychiatric establishment” in the comments!

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I welcome any correspondance at bpdtransformation@gmail.com

If you are struggling with BPD yourself or are trying to help a borderline individual, I would be happy to listen to your story and provide feedback if possible. Feel free to provide constructive criticism of this site also.

This article is the opinion of a non-professional layperson, and should not be taken as medical advice or as the view of a therapist who is professionally qualified to treat Borderline Personality Disorder or any other mental health condition. Readers should consult with a qualified mental health professional before undertaking any treatment.

Splitting is often mentioned in blogs and books about BPD. Here I’ll give an overview of this defense mechanism, offer ways of understanding it, and suggest ideas for overcoming it.

What does splitting mean? It describes how someone views themselves and others as all-good or all-bad at a given time, not as a mix of good and bad qualities. It can be illustrated with examples. Here are three scenarios that show splitting in action:

Example 1: The Mean Professor

In our first example, a “borderline” woman gets back a paper in her college English class with a grade of C. The professor notes that the grammar, syntax, and thesis need to be improved, and suggests a revision. He adds that the overall organization was on the right track, making encouraging remarks about several ideas. Nevertheless, the student feels rage in response to the grade of C. She views the professor as mean, as a harsh grader, and as “out to find and punish any mistake.” The student does not take in the positive remarks, which could have balanced her thinking by preventing the professor from appearing totally negative. By only focusing on the bad aspects of the situation and cancelling out the positive, the student remains internally attached to an “all bad” view of the outside world. This is an example of negative or all-bad splitting.

An important thing to notice about splitting is that the individual becomes actively involved in maintaining their view of the world in a “split” way, via the way they fantasize about and color external reality. In other words, the person’s mind only recognizes or takes in a certain kind of emotional stimulus – e.g. critical remarks in this case – and the person either does not recognize, or actively rejects, the opposite kind of stimulus – balancing, positive remarks. In this way the person does not experience any ambivalence, thoughtfulness, or reflective-capacity in relation to what is going on. Rather, the (only partially negative in this case) experience is responded to as if it really were 100% bad emotionally. This severely limits the ways in which the individual can respond to the outside world.

The origin of all-bad splitting was further discussed in the article on Fairbairn’s developmental model, here:

With regard to a person not recognizing positive experiences, or rejecting positive stimuli, these are examples of the out-of-contact and ambivalent symbiotic phases respectively. More on these phases can be found here:

In this second example, a “borderline” young man goes on a date with a young woman, meeting her for lunch. The pair have a relatively good conversation, finding some shared experiences in music, sports, and the schools they attended. At the end, the woman hesitantly says she would be interested in meeting again, and she gives an awkward, tentative hug to the young man.

This man had a difficult relationship with his own mother, who was distant and cold emotionally. Although he enjoyed parts of the date, he forgets the main conversation and becomes preoccupied with the awkwardness that ended their meeting. After going over it in his mind, he decides that the young woman did not like him, was just being nice out of pity, and has no interest in seeing him again. He can only understand her awkwardness at the end of the date as an unconscious communication of rejection.

This is partly an example of projection. However, it is also an example of severe splitting, in that the young man sees the woman’s attitude as all-negative while rejecting any balancing possibilities. For example, rather than viewing the woman as not liking him, he could consider that she might be nervous about expressing affection on a first date, or that she is relatively inexperienced with dating overall. These thought patterns would move away from the feeling of rejection. However, these ideas never occur to him, which is partly because he makes buries the memory of the good conversation, and fixates consciously on the negative (from his perspective) ending. Again, we can see that internally this young man is creating or “making” reality more negative than it really is, via the splitting of the woman into all-bad in his mind.

Example 3 – The Savior Parent

For a last example, a lonely, middle-aged “borderline” woman becomes involved with an older, successful professional man who wines and dines her, gives her gifts, and in general treats her with kindness. During these early good times, the woman views the man as a “savior”, the perfect gentleman, and the solution to all her problems. Even when he makes small mistakes, like his habit of being late to dates, she isn’t bothered.

However, after a few months, the man stops spending so much time with her, gives more energy to his other friends and hobbies, and has to travel more for business. He tells her he wants to take his time with the relationship. Once this happens, the “savior” image disappears, and the woman feels rejected. The “good child – perfect parent” internal images are replaced by her feeling like an unwanted, lonely child, with the man seen as an uninterested, rejecting parental-figure. Now, when they do meet and the man is a little bit late, she notices it immediately – it feels like a concrete example of how he is not concerned about her. Her feeling rejected by the lateness (all-bad splitting) is the polar opposite of when she would not even notice his lateness before, during the idealizing phase (all-good splitting).

In these examples, I use the quotations around “borderline” because these examples represent not “borderlines” (do we ever see a borderline walking down the street?), but unique human beings facing challenging past and present circumstances. As noted in other articles, I don’t believe that BPD is a valid diagnosis; nevertheless, “Borderline Personality Disorder” is a diagnostic word commonly used in association with splitting. Thus I will sometimes use the term, albeit reluctantly.

Understanding Splitting as a Normal Developmental Process

Splitting in itself is not something “bad”. Rather, it is a normal developmental phase that children pass through; the young child first takes in satisfying experiences and unsatisfying experiences separately, classifying them in different compartments in its mind. The problem of splitting continuing into adulthood only develops when the negative experiences outnumber or outweigh the positive experiences.

Integration (seeing the world ambivalently, as mixtures of good and bad qualities) begins to naturally occur in a child’s mind if more good than bad experiences accumulate over time. Let us look back at the three examples to see how someone with a higher capacity for ambivalence might have processed the same events:

Example 1 – The Constructively Critical Professor

Rather than “mean” and “out to punish any mistake”, a healthier student would have seen her professor’s remarks as constructive criticisms meant to improve her writing. She would have noted that the positive remarks indicated a concerned side of the professor, and then – holding them in her mind along with the critical remarks – she would not have twisted his image into that of a rejecting authority figure. These differing perceptions would probably affect her future behavior; making her more likely to rewrite the essay well and receive praise from the professor.

In contrast, the more troubled woman in the original example might do a lackluster revision in response to the criticism, lacking motivation due to her belief in the professor’s all-negative attitude toward her. This might lead to more trouble with the professor on future assignments, resulting in more all-bad perceptions by the student, and so on. In this way, all-bad splitting tends to form a vicious cycle where the same people are repeatedly seen as “all-bad”, related to unrealistically as “bad”, and then in reality they often do become more “bad”, treating the person less well than they otherwise would have. In other words, the person is modifying how they experience own reality via the splitting. The internal and external worlds of the person interpenetrate so that the internal negative perceptions come to shape and be shaped by how the person interacts with the outside world.

Example 2 – Ambivalence Over A Young Woman on a Date

As mentioned in the original example, a healthier man might have considered that the young woman’s awkwardness at the end of the date might not indicate lack of interest. Rather, a whole range of reasons could account for her behavior, including nervousness, lack of experience with dating, not being comfortable with expressing physical affection, a conservative upbringing, and so on. Keeping any of these ideas in mind, along with the memory of the positive aspects of their conversation, would have supported the idea that the woman could still like him despite her awkwardness.

Example 3 – A More Independent Woman

This woman’s idealizing reaction to the generous man in the initial phases of dating is not unusual. However, her reaction would be stronger than most, in that a lot of neediness underlies it. Her need for emotional support results in her wanting a perfect, all-giving parental figure, rather than just a lover. The need is not a bad thing in itself – it reflects a child’s developmental level emotionally – but it makes continuing an adult-adult relationship difficult. Because the woman wants a perfect parent, she is inevitably disappointed when the man starts to devote his energy elsewhere. At this point, the splitting shifts from all-good to all-bad, and things that did not bother the woman previously (like the man’s lateness) become upsetting.

A healthier person would not have such a strong need for the man in the initial phase of dating. Therefore, she would not be so vulnerable to disappointment when the man started to reveal imperfections later on. The man would neither be seen as so perfect initially, nor viewed as so bad and disappointing later on. Both of these differences in perception would result from increased ambivalence – the absence of all-good or all-bad splitting.

Why Does Splitting Continue Into Adulthood?

We have seen in these examples how a healthier person tends to use an integrated view of other people, containing good and bad elements together, to relate to others in a more complex, realistic way. This capacity is based on a predominance of positive experiences in these individuals’ life experience. As noted, integration naturally tends to occur when good life experiences outweigh bad ones, because a person feels safe to look at the small “bad” packet of experiences alongside the “good” group of experiences.

However, if a person’s negative experiences in life largely outweigh the good ones, then integration cannot occur in a way that feels safe. Very often, abuse, neglect, and a lack of positive relationships in childhood and/or early adulthood underlie this “structural deficit” – the lack of good experiences on which to base a capacity for ambivalence. The lack of feeling secure in childhood, and the related need to maintain hope in an overwhelming situation, are reasons that splitting gets maintained into adulthood in many adults who get the “borderline” label. Because their experience in reality – often with parents who neglect or abuse them – has been more negative than positive, they have to preserve hope of things getting better somehow. They do this using the splitting defense. With splitting, it is possible to pretend, on the basis of the few good experiences that one actually did have, that a perfect, good savior-parent or partner is still out there who can provide salvation. By contrast, it feels dangerous to the child (and later adult) to truly see that he is in great emotional danger as a result of his interpersonal world being more “bad” than “good”.

In colloquial language, one could say that it feels safer to ambivalently reflect on what is going on in one’s life when one’s experiences with others have been primarily positive. When one feels threatened most of the time, it’s not possible to be consistently aware of just how bad things are. Such an awareness would be emotionally overwhelming. In this way, at least at first, splitting is a brilliant defense mechanism that can be emotionally life-preserving

How To Move Beyond Splitting

Here I would refer the reader to blogs, books, and essays that were discussed in earlier articles. Many sources describe how building a long-term good relationship with another person and/or group is crucial to recovering from what is called Borderline Personality Disorder. The borderline individual needs to build their internal positive images up – taking in many good, supportive, loving experiences with other people in the real world – until these memories become stronger than the negative images. Eventually, integration of good and bad perceptions will naturally start to occur, and splitting will begin to be overcome.

I like to use the framework of four phases, artificial as they are, to conceptualize progress from all-bad splitting to all-good splitting to integration. The essay below describes the phases of Therapeutic Symbiosis, meaning dominance of positive images over negative ones, followed by Resolution of the Symbiosis, meaning the integration of good and bad images. These are the phases that a borderline individual usually wants to aim towards, starting from either the out-of-contact or ambivalent symbiotic phase. These earlier phases represent periods in which all-bad splitting dominates, i.e. the person’s negative views of themselves and others predominate over their positive ones, preventing ambivalence:

From my experience, I have a bias toward psychodynamic-psychoanalytic therapy; I think it’s a great way to build the positive relationship needed to overcome splitting. In long-term psychodynamic work, one can painstakingly build a trusting attachment that serves to replace the negative relationships of the past. The therapist first helps the patient to understand (via the transference relationship) how their negative, splitting-based ways of viewing the world are unrealistic and serve to block the need for more positive relationships. They also help the patient to manage difficult feelings in a way the original parents could not.

Later on, as trust and attachment develops, the therapist functions as a good parental figure, helping the patient develop their internal positive self-and-other images to the point that the good images dominate over the negative images. The positive relationship inside therapy gradually transfers to relationships in the outside world. The therapist is eventually experienced as an independent, separate person that the (formerly borderline) individual can have a mature adult-adult relationship with. During this period, the patient becomes more able to experience relationships ambivalently, as good and bad at once.

A Critique of CBT and DBT

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy or Dialectical-Behavior Therapy can certainly be helpful, and are great for helping people stabilize their lives on a short-term basis. While I do not that think that CBT and DBT are “bad”; it’s my opinion that they are sometimes formulaic and superficial. They can have a narrow, present-day focus that limits a deeper understanding of someone’s problems based on their life history. Also, some of these shorter-term therapy approaches have the following problems:

1) They focus on coping with symptoms of one’s “illness”, thus conveying the impression that BPD is a life-long condition that must be managed, not overcome. This may be partly my perception; not all forms of short-term therapy are like this and some focus on strengths. From my direct experience with it, I remember that there are positive aspects to the DBT conceptualizations, like the “wise mind” concept.

2) In some cases, CBT and DBT keep the borderline person stuck, allowing them to “cope ” a little bit better, but using the same defensive structure and split views of reality that they have had throughout life. Readers can probably relate to feeling that a short-term therapy has only been palliative, rather than helping them break through their suffering to experience the world in a new way. I think deep improvement requires much longer than short-term therapies allow for, and that it involves understanding one’s history and defenses in depth.

In my opinion, CBT and DBT (both of which I’ve also experienced myself, years ago) do not often continue long enough to build the positive self and object-images to the point needed to overcome splitting; CBT and DBT are often given for periods of only weeks or months. Again, in my opinion, overcoming splitting and associated defenses usually requires at least a few years. That is not meant to be pessimistic – while years may sound like a long time, things can gradually get better and better. Also, CBT and DBT can definitely help a person toward stabilizing a difficult situation, coping better with difficult feelings, and starting to be experience the world more ambivalently. It is not that shorter-term or manualized treatments are bad; but they may be limited in what they can achieve.

3) Going deeper, CBT and DBT create the illusion that BPD is a valid diagnosis that means the same thing for different individuals, but let’s not go there this time. If I get started on that train, it will take a long time to stop! 🙂

Having made these criticisms, I should admit that they might be wrong. That is why I noted that these thoughts are only opinions. Generalizing about therapy is a dangerous thing to do – a lot of success depends on the quality of the individual therapist, regardless of orientation, and the resources and motivation of the patient. Also, people have many options that can help outside of therapy. Therefore, my critiques should be taken as generalizations that have little meaning for an individual. No doubt, many people have benefitted from CBT and DBT, and if it works for them, that is all that matters. As one of my old therapists said, we should “take what is useful, and leave the rest.” If you have positive experiences with any of these forms of therapy, please share it in the comments.

Other Approaches to Overcoming Splitting

The discussion above assumes that people want to use psychotherapy as the main vehicle to overcome their problems. Of course, this is not always true. My first recommendation for those looking for another approach is to check out Clare’s writing on overcoming BPD, at:

Clare has many great articles about how she recovered from her problems without using intensive psychotherapy. I find her way of thinking about “borderline” problems to be humble, helpful, and wise. At the very least, her approach is more mature and encouraging than a lot of the pessimistic ideas discussed by “non-borderlines” on other forums! I hope I don’t offend anyone with this 🙂

Second, self-help groups like 12-step and other similar organizations can be very helpful, and I recommend at least trying them to everyone. These groups can help to establish a foundation of positive, trusting relationships, and can therefore be crucial to eventually overcoming splitting.

Third, for many people it can be helpful to educate oneself skeptically about BPD! What skeptical education means is to read widely, taking in many differing viewpoints on borderline issues without accepting one viewpoint as right. In my opinion, a lot of information about BPD on the internet is either so superficial as to be useless, or just plain wrong (this especially applies to viewpoints that involve strong pessimism toward borderlines, as well as viewpoints that consider BPD to be an “illness” with a genetic or biological basis).

Unfortunately, negative viewpoints on BPD may have a strong influence on people who become identified with the term, causing them to think negatively about their future. In this way, the very concept of BPD can sometimes become yet another obstacle to taking in positive experiences, making an already challenging task of recovery harder. So, my thinking is that changing one’s view of BPD to something more hopeful and flexible, or even rejecting the diagnosis model entirely, can be useful.

Fourth, and this is a truism, but friends and family can be so crucial to getting better. I understand that for many people who identify with BPD, family are a problem. But this is not always the case. Whenever family and friends can be turned into supporters, and relationships with them used for growth, it helps. In my experience, the more isolated that people are, the more prone they are to all-bad splitting. This is because isolation maintains the deficit of positive internal experiences, leading a person to feeling less secure and supported. While in this state people are less able to reflect on their experiences ambivalently.

Fifth, Helen Albanese gave a good overview of how splitting can be resolved in BPD in her book, The Difficult Borderline Patient: Not So Difficult To Treat. It is a brief, non-technical introduction to psychodynamic thinking about splitting and BPD, and Albanese conveys a lot of optimism that the condition can be overcome. It is accessible to the layperson in a way that most psychoanalytic books are not. I recommend checking it out in the used books on Amazon! (I have no affiliation with the author).

Understanding Splitting When One Is “Borderline”

To conclude, I think people working through borderline issues can benefit from understanding in greater depth how splitting operates – how viewing themselves and others as “all-bad” traps them in a negative cycle of seeing the outside world as all-bad, expecting bad things to happen, inducing others to respond negatively, feeling negative in response to treatment which they are partly responsible for, and so on.

This is an encouraging perspective, because if one gains insight into how one is misperceiving reality as “all-bad”, one can then start to understand how to move past the distortions. In other words, a person can become aware that they are seeing reality in a “delusional”, one-sided way, and that there are more good parts to outside reality than they often perceive. This can be an eye-opening, sometimes amazing experience to a person who starts to see things as good and bad together for the first time.

Getting past splitting sometimes makes me think of the movie Inception, where there are different levels of reality symbolized in different levels of dreams. In the early phases of mostly all-bad splitting (like in one level of a dream), reality is viewed all one way or the other. But on the higher level, where integration or ambivalence reigns, the world appears totally different, more complex and complete. It’s like the difference between seeing things as three-dimensional and in color, versus black or white.

Ok, I will finish this here! I hope this had some useful ideas, and feel free to share any thoughts with me via email or in the comments.